best longform essays

longform articles & essays 101

A comprehensive guide on longform journalism: favorite sites, newsletters, and a starter pack of my favorite articles.

what is longform journalism and why should you read it?

Longform journalism is essentially an article that is a long read, typically ranging between 2,000 to over 10,000 words. The lengthy word count allows for more detailed, developed pieces of writing that have room to expand and truly breathe. The content can vary, from investigative reporting to personal essays, from interviews to short fiction published in magazines and newspapers.

In the last year or so, I’ve begun reaching for longform essays often. It’s long enough to feel as satisfactory as a good nonfiction book, but it is also short enough that I can read it on my commute to work or other places. They are also just massively underrated outlets for reading—they are incredibly diverse in content and style and very informative. Articles pack the same depth of analysis and research as nonfiction books while being more accessible due to their short length.

I constantly strive to keep myself educated and knowledgeable even if I’m not in a classroom setting. Longform articles fill that education void for me, so I always try to make it a habit of reading at least one article daily, even when I don't have time to read actual books. It also increases my attention span (something I direly need to do because social media doomscrolling has been killing it). I treat these essays and articles like brain food, so it's always fun to learn something new.

where do you find articles & essays?

My go-to sites for articles are: The New Yorker, Aeon, The Paris Review, and The Atlantic. On these sites, will always be able to find a fantastic article on so many different topics.

Here is a big list of around 30 newspapers, magazines, and sites that have excellent long-form articles and never let me down. I tried to put them in order of the ones I read from the most, with descriptions of what you can expect to find on each magazine/newspaper.

The New Yorker : An American magazine that covers everything from politics to culture to art to fiction. Most articles are gems, and many of my favorite writers also write longform content on here every now and then. Here are some of the journalists I consistently follow and read from: Patrick Radden Keefe (true crime), Kathryn Schulz (anything from science to geography to memoirs), Peter Schjeldahl (art), Rachel Syme (profiles), and Jia Tolentino (feminism and culture).

Aeon : The best free magazine out there. Aeon covers essays about philosophy , psychology , science , society and culture . Every article is so well researched and written. So many of my favorite articles of all time are from this site, and everything feels like brain food. Here is an article about sulking , one about nostalgia , and one about female friendships .

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Featuring beautiful illustrations, original photography, and engaging interactives, our Longform program invites readers to explore the spectrum of the subjects The Verge covers — tech, science, culture and transportation — in unbridled depth. Whether it’s a personal essay, a years-in-the-making investigation, or gripping narrative-driven feature, every piece in the Longform program is an opportunity to get the full story.

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Faraday Future’s still haunted by the past of its billionaire founder

Can an electric car startup save itself from its founder?

The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 Max

How the Boeing 737 Max betrayed its pilots and passengers

How a Vermont social network became a model for online communities

Front Porch Forum’s secret? Staying local

Dirty dealing in the $175 billion Amazon Marketplace

Prime and punishment

How a nuclear stalemate left radioactive waste stranded on a California beach

Nuclear waste is all dressed up with nowhere to go

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The unlikely story of a meteorite hunter who became a fugitive from the law

The rock that fell to Earth

California’s largest lake is dying, leaving toxic dust behind

Dust rising

Inside the bad math that lets Coca-Cola say it gives back all the water it uses

I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t

Facebook is an emotional labor machine, and if you want to leave it, you’re going to have to start doing a lot of work

What happens when an algorithm cuts your health care

When whisper networks let us down

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Inside Faraday Future's financial house of cards

Boy Band of the Future

Brockhampton is redefining one of the most loaded terms in popular music

Smoke Screen

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How technology helped a blind athlete run free at the New York Marathon

Beyond the finish line

Guiding light

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Ghost in the cell

How an inmate hacker hid computers in the ceiling and turned his prison upside down

The race against heat

Searching for help

She turned to Google for help getting sober. She ended up in a nightmare.

Meet the streamers using Twitch to pay for college

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Take a trip to Los Angeles' new internet celebrity summer camp

How Artsy finally convinced galleries to sell art online

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The secret origin story of the iPhone

Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks is the audience: once delighted, now disintegrating

AI, the humanity!

Super Deluxe built a weird internet empire. Can it succeed on TV?

The Viral Machine

How Anker is beating Apple and Samsung at their own accessory game

Inside the portable battery pack giant

Wakanda Reborn

Tour Black Panther’s reimagined homeland with Ta-Nehisi Coates

Massive attack: How a weapon against war became a weapon against the web

How a weapon against war became a weapon against the web

The Future Agency: Inside the big business of imagining the future

“Every act of future making is an act of future taking."

Legal threats and disgruntled clients: inside the ‘Uber for private jets’

How JetSmarter puts fear into its millionaire customers

Can Genius beat the rap?

Genius quietly laid off a bunch of its engineers — now can it survive as a media company?

The empathy layer

Can an app that lets strangers — and bots — become amateur therapists create a safer internet?

Cracking the elaborate code

Why body language holds the key to virtual reality

DeRay Mckesson on Black Lives Matter and building tools for digital activism

One of the Black Lives Matter movement’s most prominent voices is 31-year-old DeRay Mckesson. With his now-iconic blue vest, Mckesson, now the interim chief of Human Capital for Baltimore City Public Schools, has balanced using his platform online and off in order to draw attention to matters such as public safety and law enforcement reform.

Gene editing will transform cancer treatment

Marc Andreessen: flying cars are closer than you think

Perfecting your digital assistant

Miami Beach has run out of sand. Now what?

EA's CEO on why your life is about to be a video game

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Longreads : The best longform stories on the web

Our Most-Read Longreads Originals of 2022

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The 10 stories below were funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers .

It’s that time of year again! Our annual year-end series has evolved over the past decade, but our aim remains the same: to share and celebrate the best in longform nonfiction storytelling across the internet, and to honor writers and journalists publishing exceptional work. We’re thrilled to kick off our Best of 2022 collection with today’s list of our 10 most-read essays and reported stories .

The digital publishing landscape is uncertain, and continues to change. In 2023 we’ll continue to curate our favorite reads on the web, and publish original essays and reading lists from both established and emerging writers. Thanks for reading and supporting us!

— Carolyn, Cheri, Krista, Peter, and Seyward

1. Queens of Infamy: Isabella of France

Anne Thériault | June 2022 | 29 minutes (8,006 words)

Married off at age 12, Isabella put up with her husband’s shenanigans over decades. Eventually, the She-Wolf of France had had enough.

2. The Women Who Built Grunge

Lisa Whittington-Hill | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)

Bands like L7 and Heavens to Betsy were instrumental to the birth of the grunge scene, but for decades were treated like novelties and sex objects. Thirty years later, it’s time to reassess their legacy.

3. Love Song to Costco

Yuxi Lin | June 2022 | 12 minutes (3,311 words)

In the great halls of Costco, two of our greatest fears are assuaged — that of not having enough, and that of not being enough.

4. ‘That Girl is Going to Get Herself Killed’

Krista Diamond | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,342 words)

There is risk in the wilderness — even in mild adventures — and yet we still seek to reason with it, to assign order to it, to control it, and to tempt it.

5. The Cabin on the Mountain

Colin Dickey | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)

Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Other times, the solution requires retooling your perspective.

6. Life in the Slow Lane

Olivia Potts | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,649 words)

Cooking all day while the cook is away. How the slow cooker changed the world.

7. The Hare Krishnas of Coal Country

Ashley Stimpson | February 2022 | 26 minutes (7,219 words)

The world is full of make-believe. Some of it is sweet, some of it is sick. It persists because we have found no other antidote for pain.

8. Final Girl, Terrible Place

Lesley Finn | July 2022 | 27 minutes (7,517 words)

I was expecting a handy theory. What I found was a way of seeing that would help me decode a script I’d been stuck in for much of my life.

9. How Wednesday Addams Birthed a Generation of Cynics

Emily Alford  |  November 2022  |  8 minutes (2,132 words)

Nearly 30 years ago, Christina Ricci’s version of the character reinforced millennials’ suspicion that “the bright side” is an illusion.

10. Children in the Garden

Devin Kelly | January 2022 | 27 minutes (7,394 words)

Another beauty of endurance is that it is happening at all times. It is everywhere we look. To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.

You can also browse all of our year-end collections since 2011  in one place .

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Rolling Stone’s Top Longreads of 2020

By RS Editors

Each year we publish tens of thousands of stories, covering music news and trends, political analysis, how culture is constantly shifting, and critical takes on our entertainment landscape. So we realize some may get lost in the shuffle — especially in a year when it seemed we were consuming more media than ever before as we tried to make sense of the world in which we live.

And there are always interviews, investigative features, and provocative storytelling that deserves to be revisited. Our most-read story of the year was an essay by anthropologist Wade Davis, titled “The Unraveling of America,” which ricocheted around the internet and was shared far and wide on social media and debated for months during the global Covid-19 quarantine measures.

Below, we offer a selection of some of our most-read and thought-provoking longform features from 2020, a year that felt like it might never end.

America’s Radioactive Secret

by Justin Nobel

Killing the Truth

By Andy Kroll 

The murder of Seth Rich was a family tragedy. Fox News helped make it a national spectacle that has haunted his loved ones for years

The Unraveling of America

By Wade Davis

How Covid-19 signals the end of the American era

Rudy Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor?

By Seth Hettena

Rudy Giuliani was once a national hero who refused to let Donald Trump buy him breakfast. How did he become who he is today?

The President and the Plague

By Jeff Goodell

Editor’s picks

Every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history.

How Donald Trump failed at the single most important task of the Oval Office: keeping the American people safe from harm

The Four Men Responsible For America’s COVID-19 Test Disaster

By Tim Dickinson

The White House’s inability to track the disease as it spread across the nation crippled the government’s response and led to the worst disaster this country has faced in nearly a century

Matt Gaetz Is Having a Bad Hair Day

By Ryan Bort

The 37-year-old Florida representative and MAGA mouthpiece has used an aggressive media strategy to become one of the most high-profile Republicans in Congress. But at what cost?

Uganda’s ‘Ghetto President’: How Bobi Wine Went from Dancehall Grooves to Revolutionary Politics

by David Peisner

One of Africa’s biggest music stars hopes his country’s young, impoverished masses can make him their next leader. But can he survive until Election Day?

Why Policing Is Broken

By Matt Taibbi

Years of research on brutality cases shows that bad incentives in politics and city bureaucracies are major drivers of police violence

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on How to Build a Green New Deal

By Tessa Stuart

The congresswoman on her vision for a post-fossil-fuel future and an economy that works for working people

An American Powder Keg

By Andy Kroll

In Alamance County, North Carolina, the nation’s future and past collide — often in terrifying fashion

Erik Prince’s Private Wars

The Blackwater founder wants to bring back his company’s glory days — and he’s campaigning for Donald Trump’s help to do it. But he’s haunted by past failures and is facing questions about a mercenary fiasco in Libya

Loving the Alien

By Stephen Rodrick

How UFO culture took over America

Pleas of Insanity: The Mysterious Case of Anthony Montwheeler

By Rob Fischer

In the wake of a vicious murder, the state of Oregon wrestles with what went wrong in its mental health system

Planet Plastic

How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades

The Price of Isolation

By Alex Morris

America faces a hidden epidemic of loneliness that may make us more vulnerable to the pandemic

The Power of Black Lives Matter

By Jamil Smith

How the movement that’s changing America was built and where it goes next

How Ron Jeremy Allegedly Used His Porn-Star Image to Sexually Prey on Women

By EJ Dickson

From movie shoots to industry conventions to sex-positive campus events, women who encountered the adult-film star have come forward alleging he used his schlubby image as a cover for harassment and assault

Children of the Climate Crisis

A generation of kids faces a more dangerous world as they come of age in the era of eco-anxiety

Rising Tides, Troubled Waters: The Future of Our Ocean

The ocean is undergoing unprecedented changes. What does it mean for marine life, the planet, and us?

Sex, Drugs, and the Glory Days of NYC Nightlife: Peter Gatien Looks Back

By Shawn McCreesh

The one-eyed club impresario is back in the city he once called home — and ready to tell his story

Sin and Scandal at Liberty University

by Bob Moser

Jerry Falwell, Jr. turned a struggling Christian school into a billion-dollar enterprise and became Donald Trump’s evangelical wingman — until his demons caught up with him

Inside the Bright Life of a Murdered Hollywood Sex Therapist

Amie Harwick was found strangled and thrown out of her own window on Valentine’s Day. When her abusive ex was arrested, advocates were horrified: Could her death have been prevented?

How Climate Change Is Ushering in a New Pandemic Era

By Jeff Goodell 

A warming world is expanding the range of deadly diseases and risking an explosion of new zoonotic pathogens from the likes of bats, mosquitoes, and ticks

Inside the Race to End the Pandemic

By Elizabeth Yuko

Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine put their lives on hold to create a Covid-19 vaccine — and with the weight of the world on their shoulders, there’s no end in sight

A History of Violence: Why I Loved Cop Shows, and Why They Must Change

By Alan Sepinwall

I broke into television criticism because of my love for a show about a racist, sexist, alcoholic cop who used the N-word and beat confessions out of suspects. I’ve been thinking about that a  lot  over the past few months.

The Untouchables: An Investigation Into the Violence of the Chicago Police

By Paul Solotaroff

Why does the department protect its most dangerous cops while retaliating against officers who tell the truth?

The Unanswered Questions of Tamla Horsford’s Death

By Nile Cappello 

A black mother of five died at an all-white party in Georgia. It might have been a complete accident. But because of a compromised investigation, we may never know

Will Furries Ever Go Mainstream?

By EJ Dickson 

At Midwest FurFest, people donning human-size animal costumes came together for an inclusive, uplifting convention. But will their community ever be widely accepted? And is that even what they want?

Inside Operation Gideon, a Coup Gone Very Wrong

By Kevin Dugan

Why did three American ex-Special Forces soldiers try to overthrow the Venezuelan government?

The Joy of Lizzo

By Brittany Spanos

She has become a new kind of pop superstar, full of relentless positivity. But it took a long time and a lot of heartache

The Rebirth of SZA

By Emma Carmichael

She transformed R&B with her honesty and warmth. Fans are desperate for new music — but first, she’s working on herself

From Big Pink to Whitney’s Dream House: Here’s What It’s Like to Live in a Pop Star’s Former Home

By Brenna Ehrlich

Bob Dylan, Whitney Houston, the Grateful Dead, and Patti Smith all made these places famous. Meet the residents who inherited the homes’ legacies — and sometimes find fans picnicking on their lawn

Bad Bunny in Captivity

By Suzy Exposito

How does a Latin-pop superstar spend lockdown? Hanging out with his girlfriend, watching ‘Toy Story’ and surprising the world

Grimes: Live From the Future

By Brian Hiatt

The real life and fantastic visions of a digital warrior

The Remarkable Rise of Lil Baby

By Charles Holmes

Four years ago, Atlanta’s Dominique Jones got out of prison and learned to rap. Now, he’s a superstar who’s streaming in the billions and helping to shape a new vision for America

The Week the Music Stopped

By Samantha Hissong, Ethan Millman and Amy X. Wang 

In March, Covid-19 wiped concerts and festivals off the calendar — and that was just the beginning. Inside music’s unprecedented crisis

Pay-for-Play Was Banned From Radio — But Texts Reveal It May Still Be Thriving

By Elias Leight

Among the 2,500 text messages obtained by Rolling Stone, several suggest a link between airplay and record label payments

Little Richard: The Wild Heart of Rock & Roll

by Joe Levy

From the moment Little Richard shouted “A wop bop a loo bop a wop bam boom!” in 1955, the world was never the same. His life was full of painful internal conflict, but no one better defined the freedom and raw energy of rock & roll

John Prine: The Last Days and Beautiful Life of an American Original

By Patrick Doyle

His wife, Fiona, son Jody, and others remember a big-hearted genius who championed new artists and made the most of the small things in life

And in the End: The Beatles’ Breakup and Why Their Music Matters 50 Years Later

By Rob Sheffield

Fifty years ago, the Beatles went through rock’s most famous breakup. Inside the heartbreak, the brotherhood, and why the music still matters

Linda Martell: Country’s Lost Pioneer

By David Browne

Linda Martell was the first black female solo artist to play the Grand Ole Opry, but her promising country career was plagued by racism and ended almost as quickly as it began. Fifty years after her only album, she’s speaking out

Melody and Mischief: How Adam Schlesinger Built a Career Like No Other Songwriter

By Simon Vozick-Levinson

From Fountains of Wayne to ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ Adam Schlesinger, who died of coronavirus complications at 52, wrote songs with wry humor and lots of heart

Laughter, Tears, and Harmony: How Phoebe Bridgers Made ‘Punisher’

By Angie Martoccio

Today’s bleakest, funniest folk rocker took her time working on her second solo album

‘Freedom-Loving People’: Behind the Scenes at That Controversial Smash Mouth Show in South Dakota

By Jon Blistein

The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally will likely draw hundreds of thousands to the Black Hills, and one campground/venue is hosting bands like Smash Mouth, Lit, the Guess Who, and more

Eddie Van Halen: The Joy and Pain of Rock’s Last Guitar Superhero

Eddie Van Halen reinvented the electric guitar by the age of 22 — and that was just the beginning. Here’s the full story of a rock legend

For Music’s Crew Workers, 2020 Has Been Devastating

By Samantha Hissong and David Browne

These road warriors were planning on a huge year. Seven months into the pandemic, they’re struggling to get by, dealing with crippling mental health issues, and contemplating new careers

Fighting to Be Heard: The Story of the Black Country Music Association

By Jonathan Bernstein

How a group of black country singers came together in Nashville to create a once-thriving community

Heavy Metal, Year One: The Inside Story of Black Sabbath’s Groundbreaking Debut

By Kory Grow

Half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?” the band and their collaborators look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement

Bless the Rains: Inside Toto’s Slow Fall and Surprise Resurrection

By Andy Greene

How the self-described “most critically-reviled band of all time” staged an unlikely comeback — until a lawsuit nearly ended it all

‘He Made the World Bigger’: Inside John Zorn’s Jazz-Metal Multiverse

By Hank Shteamer

For more than 30 years, the maverick composer has been splicing genres and unifying disparate scenes. Zorn and collaborators from Mike Patton to Bill Frisell reflect on why music has never been the same

David Sanborn, Jazz Saxophonist Who Played on David Bowie's 'Young Americans,' Dead at 78

David gilmour sets first u.s. tour dates in eight years, hear the journey tune steve perry rerecorded with steve lukather's son, childish gambino surprise-drops complete '3.15.20' album and plots new world tour.

Against All Odds, Live Concerts Are Coming Back This Fall

By Jon Freeman & Amy Wang

Nashville’s Opry House and Ryman, and a handful of other U.S. live-music venues, are opening their doors. From limited-capacity clubs to outdoor farm shows, this is how concerts will look

Ghosts, Guitars, and the E Street Shuffle

How Bruce Springsteen confronted death, saw Clarence in his dreams, and knocked out a raw and rocking new album with the world’s greatest bar band

A Reggae King Rises Again

By Jason Fine

Toots Hibbert is one of the pioneers of reggae — and wrote many of its classic hits. After a devastating injury, the man they call Fireball is back to reclaim his throne

‘Hollaback Girl’ With Metal Guitars’: Sleigh Bells Look Back on ‘Treats’ at 10

By Claire Shaffer

A decade on from their heady ascent through the blogosphere, Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller discuss the origins of their signature aggro-pop sound, getting co-signed by Beyoncé, and what their debut means to them now

Yacht Rock Babylon

The epic journey of the Doobie Brothers, from Seventies biker bars to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

J.K. Rowling Used to Want to Debate Gender. Now She Just Insults Trans People

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‘Hades II’ Is One of the Year’s Best Games — and It’s Not Even Finished

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Longform digital journalism is on the rise.

Here’s why., here’s the paradox of the modern web: our devices and social networks have reduced our attention spans to that of newborn kittens; and yet, we crave longform content..

That sounds counter-intuitive, but there is strong evidence that the best performing pieces of content on the web are longreads.  The latest data from Hubspot  concluded that the highest ranking blog posts in search were on average 2,330 words, with some of the best performing — known as ‘pillar posts’ — stretching to 10,000 words.

Media companies have known this for a while. In 2014, Megan Garber published  a piece in the  Atlantic , highlighting that a 6,000 word piece from  Buzzfeed  received over one million page-views over the course of a month — with nearly half of those on mobile devices.

The new era in longform

Longform journalism is clearly making a comeback. Now, major news brands around the world are investing heavily in longform feature stories .

Take, for example, this story from  Arab News  on the life and assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani. Using illustrations, video, maps, and archival photos, the  Arab News  team provides a rich and detailed  account  of Soleimani’s impact in the region.

Longform journalism is clearly making a comeback. Now, major news brands around the world are investing heavily in longform feature stories.

Image captions

Publish your first story free with Shorthand. Craft stunning, interactive web content — no code or web design skills required. Get started.

Other media companies — NBC, the BBC, Stuff, Sky News, Nature, Prodavinci, El Periodico, the NZ Herald, and more — are all producing stunning longform articles, narrative journalism, watchdog journalism , comics journalism , and digital features.

What is longform journalism?

There are seven features common to most great longform journalism:

1. It's long  

Let's address the elephant (or is it giraffe?) in the room: Longform journalism is typically much longer than average. But there's much more to longform  journalism than it's length. It is its own genre of content, with specific features and requirements that you need to keep in mind. Learn more in our guide to creating longform content .

2. It focuses on stories that need room to breathe

Not every story needs to be 10,000 words. Longform stories typically have multiple sections, with a narrative that gradually builds in intensity and significance. As the best journalists know, not all stories deserve that kind of attention. Sometimes there isn't any 'there' there, and it's best to keep a story piece short and to-the-point.

3. It respects the reader's attention

The best longform stories understand that the reader is giving them a rare gift: sustained attention. While the stories might be longer, careful editorial attention is paid to every word. There is never room for fluff or filler in great journalism, no matter if it's 700 words or 7,000. 

4. It's a specific skill

We've said that not all stories need to go long, and the same is true of journalists. Longform writing is a specific skill. Not all journalists have the patience or desire to report out a longer story with multiple beats.

5. It's more expensive to produce

There's a reason why longform journalism is relatively rare: it's typically more expensive to produce. While not all journalists will take six months to produce a story — like those intrepid, patient reporters from  The New Yorker  in decades past — great longform stories do require more resources to report and write.

6. It's deeply reported

As a return for the resources invested in its production, longform journalism is typically deeply reported, meaning that it has multiple sources, which have each been explored in detail. 

7. It's digital

As we'll discuss below, the best longform journalism is increasingly digital, interactive, and immersive. It typically includes a range of multimedia assets — including illustrations, photos, videos, animations, and data visualisations — and is a full-screen, distraction-free reading experience.

Longform business models

Why are news media increasingly producing longform content? 

The work is clearly important.  The deadly secret of China's invisible armada , a longform story from NBC News, broke news of illegal Chinese fishing vessels operating off the coast of North Korea. The story used satellite imagery and illustrated maps to show boat movements — which allegedly contributed to the death of North Korean fisherman and the creation of ‘widow’s villages.’

But this isn’t the only reason. With the rise of the internet, many media companies moved their content online, betting — or, at least, hoping — that digital advertising revenue would replace the decline in revenue from print. 

At the same time, many news sites diverted resources to create a steady feed of clickable short form content — otherwise known as clickbait. 

This content did its job. Headlines were clicked, traffic went up, and it seemed like the future of online news was going to look a little like this:

As a result, many media companies turned to a subscription or membership model. Sometimes, as with the  New York Times , this led to a paywall. You can read more about how to implement a paywall here , as well as our list of the best paywall providers .

At other times, as with Stuff and  The Guardian , companies leveraged their reputation for quality to ask for voluntary contributions. Many of these companies also invested in sponsored content, otherwise known as native advertising. You can see some excellent examples of native advertising in our guide.

The old business model depended on clicks, but the new business model depended on reputation. 

And what’s the most reliable way to get a reputation for quality? Longform digital feature stories.

If your organisation is ready to build your own longform feature stories without writing a line of code,  get started with Shorthand now .

No-code longform digital stories

This all makes sense — but in the early years, media companies looking to publish longform digital stories hit a snag. That snag was the prohibitive cost of developers. 

As we’ve written elsewhere, one of the first longform digital stories — Snow Fall — was published by the New York Times . Initially, the industry celebrated the story as the future of journalism on the web. 

That enthusiasm didn’t last long. It was soon revealed that the story had required a team of developers to work for months — that’s months, plural — to get everything working. No company, perhaps not even the  Times , can scale that model of storytelling.

This is where digital storytelling platforms come in. With the rise of digital storytelling platforms, it’s become much easier to build beautiful, immersive, multimedia stories at scale. This is because developers and web designers are no longer an essential part of the process. 

In this post, we’re going to introduce the five elements of high-performing longform digital stories. We’ll also look at some inspiring examples of longform digital storytelling from media companies from around the world, including the BBC, NBC, and Sky News. 

We won't tell you how to write a longform story — you're the expert in that — but we can help you build a stunning digital story that performs brilliantly on the web.

Looking for more examples of great journalism? Check out our list of memorable environmental journalism .

Respect the attention of the reader

These days, it seems like most of the web is a concerted, algorithmically-driven attempt to distract the reader. 

Many websites have multiple menu options, pop-ups, CTAs, banners, and a range of other elements — all designed to drag the reader's attention away from the primary content on the page and get them to perform another action. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this sort of design. In context, many of these elements make perfect sense.

But they spell doom for longform feature stories. Longform stories — just like narrative television or novels — require the reader to make an initial effort to enter the world of the story. For most readers, this effort is only going to be made once. And as soon as you break the spell, they are unlikely to put the effort in again.

This means that you need to build your story with the reader's attention in mind. At Shorthand, we call this immersive storytelling — that is, storytelling that has been intentionally designed to keep the reader's attention. 

Immersive stories are usually more successful in keeping the reader on page — and also more successful in getting the reader to click through to other content afterwards.

One example of an immersive digital story comes from the team at Sky Sports , marking 100 days of protest in sport after the murder of George Floyd.

Visualise your data

Many longform feature stories are informed by data. But, too often, this data is presented as a static chart, or otherwise excluded from the story. 

There are sometimes good reasons for this. Data can be tricky to work with, and data journalists are still relatively thin on the ground. Data visualisation tools have also been historically expensive or prohibitively technical.

The good news is that this is changing. With digital storytelling platforms, you can easily embed third-party data visualisation tools, such as Tableau or Flourish. 

In platforms like Shorthand, you can also create strong, interactive visualisations from static images — without writing a line of code. Learn more in our guide to data journalism, featuring Sky News and our guide to creating stunning data stories .

One example of this is Labour Day from media company Stuff.

If you're looking for more examples and inspiration, check out our guide, 8 examples of powerful data stories .

Find economies of scale

Longform stories often take the form of standalone projects, and usually take a village to produce, including journalists, editors, and creators of visual assets, such as photographers and designers. 

For one-off projects, this can be expensive. In the current environment, media companies need to find efficiencies for longform projects to be feasible.

As we’ve mentioned above, there are good business reasons to publish longform stories. But even with these business reasons, costs still need to be managed. 

The best way to do this is to identify economies of scale. Some of these economies will involve members of your team specialising — and getting more efficient — at specific parts of the story production process. 

But the lowest hanging fruits are your technology choices. Building bespoke stories — like the Times with 'Snow Fall' — clearly doesn’t scale (for many media companies, it might not even scale to a single story). 

This leaves you with a range of technology choices, from developer and design-heavy tools to no-code storytelling platforms. It also leaves you with a range of pricing options, from metered per-story payments to unlimited story publishing.

For media companies, we recommend unlimited story plans. This means that the cost per story decreases with every story you publish, and you never become a victim of your own success.

Do more with your visual assets

Most stories published on the web look and feel visually underwhelming — even when they have great visual assets at hand. This is because the legacy content management systems (CMS) used by most companies aren't built to utilise digital storytelling techniques. 

With a digital storytelling platform, you can make much more effective use of your visual assets.

At its most simple, this involves including more images and illustrations than you otherwise would. With media galleries, a range of images can be used within the context of the story — without requiring the reader to necessarily focus on all of them. 

With scroll-based animation, you can also create powerful transitions and contrasts from full-screen images — all triggered by the reader. 

Other visual assets, including video, illustrations, and maps, can also be put to powerful use in a digital story.

A great example of this comes from Sky News Italia, in their series of stories on European cities during lockdown.

For more visual storytelling tips, check out our guide, 8 tips for great visual storytelling .

Experiment with form

Feature stories are often written and produced by, well, writers. As such, their visual form — that is, how they are designed and presented on the web — is only considered after the piece has been finished. 

There is often a good reason for this: most publications are constrained by their technology choices. But in practice it means that most stories on the web are visually conservative. If you read enough feature stories, they all start to look sort of the same. 

With digital storytelling, all bets are off. Some are almost entirely produced with photography and video, with little text. Others tell their story through charts, maps, and other data visualisations. 

And yet others, like this story from the BBC, use illustrations. 

Not all longform stories need to be this visually experimental — but some can. With digital storytelling platforms, you can create visually stunning longform stories, without spending months on development and design.

Get started

If you’re ready to get started with longform digital storytelling, then sign up for shorthand now., publish your first story free with shorthand.

Craft sumptuous content at speed. No code required.

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What Does “Longform” Journalism Really Mean?

On love and ruin , terminology, and the anxiety of limits.

Writers are preoccupied with limits: temporal and physical and metaphysical, the divisions between self and other, the mind’s inability to reconstruct the subject of its fascination. Borges envisioned “a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point.” Moby-Dick ’s Ishmael claimed that “true places” resisted the attempts of mapmakers. Stories often assume the shape of their limitations. In 2006, the same year that Twitter launched, Robert Olen Butler published Severance , a story collection that employed what one reviewer called “a new—and unlikely to be replicated—art form, the vignette of the severed head told in exactly 240 words.”

For journalists, tasked with something like verisimilitude, these limits are always existential. Joe Gould claimed to be writing an oral history whose purview was the knowable world. Joseph Mitchell, who first profiled Gould for The New Yorker in 1942, came to doubt the history’s existence, and said as much after Gould’s death. Gould’s history was never published. Another New Yorker staff writer, Jill Lepore, suspects Gould’s compulsive writing was hypergraphia. “This is an illness, a mania,” she wrote, “but seems more like something a writer might envy.” Perhaps Mitchell did; after his final piece on Gould, Mitchell never published another word. Like Gould’s productivity, Mitchell’s silence was storied but impossible to verify. Lepore wrote about both men in “Joe Gould’s Teeth,” a feature article whose word count grew into a book-length manuscript.

“Writers tumble into this story,” wrote Lepore, “and then they plummet.” The boundaries of the observable world push inward and outward; we are fathomless, the universe immeasurable. Where, then, should a story begin and end?

In the past decade, as declining ad revenue constricted editorial space in print publications, online publishing offered journalists freedom from some of their limits. A story could be as complicated as its subject required, and as long as necessary, though the ancient caveat still applied: your readers might not stick with you until the end. Websites such as BuzzFeed, whose content seemed to assume a newly attention-deficient readership, occasionally published pieces of narrative nonfiction whose word counts reached into the thousands. Online publishers began to label such stories “longform.”

Journalists and their readers have an uneasy history with such labels. “I have no idea who coined the term ‘the New Journalism’ or when it was coined,” wrote Tom Wolfe in a 1972 feature article in New York . “I have never even liked the term.” Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote to Wolfe and threatened to “have your goddamn femurs ground into bone splinters if you ever mention my name again in connection with that horrible ‘new journalism’ shuck you’re promoting.” (Wolfe still included Thompson in his 1973 anthology, The New Journalism .) “Creative nonfiction” still enjoys wide usage, and a magazine exists by the same name. Its editor, Lee Gutkind, writes that Creative Nonfiction “defines the genre simply, succinctly, and accurately as ‘true stories well told.’” These labels amount to a shaggy taxonomy; journalists that share certain aesthetics are grouped together, and then those groups are differentiated from each other, to the presumed benefit of readers.

Such labels sometimes reward the writer, who becomes associated with a popular movement. They sometimes reward the reader, who has a new word for what she seeks. Most often, they reward the publisher. But a publisher’s loyalties can shift with the market. Medium, a publishing platform that developed an early reputation for longform journalism, distanced itself from the label. (“It was not our intention… to create a platform just for ‘long-form’ content,” said Ev Williams, Medium CEO and a co-founder of Twitter.) BuzzFeed, on the other hand, hired a “longform editor” in 2013 to oversee a section of the site devoted to such stories. The longform editor described his section as “BuzzFeed for people who are afraid of BuzzFeed.”

Whether labels like “longform” reward a story is another matter. “Length is hardly the quality that most meaningfully classifies these stories,” wrote James Bennet in The Atlantic . “Yet there’s a real conundrum here: If ‘long-form’ doesn’t fit, what term is elastic enough to encompass the varied journalism it has come to represent, from narrative to essay, profile to criticism?” The term “journalism” is, somehow, insufficient.

Taxonomy presents one conundrum; popularity makes for another. The “longform” label offers readers and writers a new way to self-identify, and a new hashtag by which they may find, distinguish and promote stories. An attendant risk is that a story’s appeal as a “longform” product could short-circuit editorial judgment and damage a writer or his subject before a large audience.

In 2014, Grantland published “ Dr. V’s Magical Putter ,” a 7,000-word profile of an inventor and transgender woman whose gender transition was revealed in the story—before she had revealed it to people in her life. “What began as a story about a brilliant woman with a new invention,” author Chris Hannan wrote, “had turned into the tale of a troubled man who had invented a new life for himself.” Hannan reveals in his final paragraphs that his subject committed suicide, and wrote, “Writing a eulogy for a person who by all accounts despised you is an odd experience.” In the New York Times , Jonathan Mahler cautioned readers and writers again “fetishizing the form and losing sight of its function.”

“Longform” springs from journalism’s anxiety over limitations—mainly, its online audience’s attention span. During the longform decade, software developers created programs that translate word counts into estimated reading times. Both Longreads.com and Longform.org use the program, as does Medium. For their first assignment, students of the late New York Times media critic David Carr wrote stories with estimated reading times of fewer than five minutes.

In 2011, The Atavist Magazine began to publish longform stories—“one blockbuster nonfiction story a month, generally between 5,000 and 30,000 words.” Since its inception, The Atavist ’s stories have been nominated for eight National Magazine Awards; the magazine’s first win, for 2015’s “Love and Ruin,” was also the first time the coveted “feature writing” award went to a digital magazine. While the magazine’s founder, Evan Ratliff, employs the “longform” label to describe The Atavist ’s work, he doesn’t fret about his audience’s attention span.

“The people who are making decisions based on that, I don’t think they’re doing it based on actual research, either,” he told Columbia Journalism Review a few months after The Atavist Magazine published its first story. “I think they’re all doing it based on anecdotal experience.” Ratliff concluded, “I don’t really care if attention spans are going down in the world overall or not.” And the universe—the unknowable curator of all the components of our stories—doesn’t care either.

Love and Ruin is a new anthology of stories culled from The Atavist ’s first five years. If labels like “longform” mean anything, then Love and Ruin is also the first collection of stories that typify a new genre, a successor to titles like Wolfe’s The New Journalism and Robert Boynton’s The New New Journalism .

“‘Longform’ written storytelling . . . was, it was said, going the way of the black rhino,” Ratliff writes in his foreword. “Our magazine is built on questioning that wisdom.” Still, Ratliff doesn’t dwell on the word; if length can be considered a characteristic of each story in Love and Ruin , then it’s the one that interests him least.

Each story in Love and Ruin first appeared online, via the magazine’s proprietary platform, along with interview excerpts, original photography, embedded videos, and optional audiobook downloads. Most also came with an estimated reading time. The shortest story in Love and Ruin —Brooke Jarvis’ 10,000-word account of the year she spent working with leprosy patients in Kalaupapa, Hawaii, as the community and its last inhabitants dwindled—is classified online as a “44 minute read.” The longest stories clear 20,000 words, which means a time commitment equivalent to watching a feature film.

The ten stories in Love and Ruin fall comfortably within the word counts that The Atavist sets for its nonfiction, a range that contemporary readers expect from “longform.” But word counts and reading times are poor distinguishing features for a genre, a lackluster explanation for why these stories should appear together, and a useless tool for evaluating the rewards of the book.

The stories in Love and Ruin don’t share many sensibilities. Ratliff writes in his foreword that there is no “house style”—a suggestion that each Atavist story is told in something closer to each writer’s authentic voice. In her introduction, New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean takes on journalism’s taxonomy problem, sets aside a few genre labels (“new journalism,” “creative nonfiction,” “longform”), and then classifies the stories in Love and Ruin as “magpie journalism.” It’s a laudatory phrase, but at a second glance it doesn’t distinguish the stories in Love and Ruin from plenty of others.

If the stories in Love and Ruin are bound by something other than glue, then it’s a sort of thematic unity, born from the same anxieties that gave us “longform.” Each story in Love and Ruin depicts its author’s struggle with the limits of investigation, representation, or understanding. “The Fort of Young Saplings” follows Vanessa Veselka’s tangential connection to a native Alaskan tribe back to the moment when that tribe’s history was overwritten. Jarvis’ story, “When We Are Called to Part,” approaches the same critical moment, when a community becomes a collection of stories, told selectively and bracketed by time. In “Mother, Stranger,” Cris Beam navigates the fog of her abusive mother’s mental illness and her own traumatic upbringing. “I didn’t have a language for my mother,” writes Beam, “probably because she didn’t have a cohesive language for herself.” The black boxes in Love and Ruin are figurative and sometimes literal; Adam Higginbotham’s “1,000 Pounds of Dynamite,” an anatomy of a failed extortion plot, features both.  

Underpinned by limits and all their attendant complications, the narratives that arise from Love and Ruin are fundamentally strange and unwieldy, and as long as they need to be. Leslie Jamison’s “52 Blue” provides Love and Ruin with its most luminous prose. But the story—about a solitary whale that sings at a unique and isolating frequency, and the people drawn to the whale’s story—also offers the anthology’s best consideration of the boundaries that shape stories and their telling.

“52 Blue suggests not just one single whale as a metaphor for loneliness, but metaphor itself as a salve for loneliness,” Jamison writes. “What if we grant the whale his whaleness, grant him furlough from our metaphoric employ, but still grant the contours of his second self—the one we’ve made—and admit what he’s done for us?”

Jamison does not reach her best ideas in few words. But without the words she uses, those ideas may not be otherwise reachable. A story’s word count can sometimes be a proxy for complexity; that’s the appeal of a label like “longform” for the readers that claim to love it. But complicated stories also refute “longform.” They leave their readers with a feeling that the story and its shape are an inevitable match. How else could it have been told?

Here, then, is The Atavist ’s chief achievement with Love and Ruin : In collecting its finest “longform” nonfiction, The Atavist created an anthology that undermines its own flimsy label—and, hopefully, refutes some of our anxiety about time and attention, and the other limits that govern our lives.

The anxiety of limitation—the dread of meaning lost, to time and to space—is recurrent. “Before there were even screens in our living rooms, the same worries reared their heads,” writes Nick Bilton in I Live in the Future, and Here’s How it Works . “There was a time in the 1920s when cultural critics feared Americans were losing their ability to swallow a long, thoughtful novel or even a detailed magazine piece. The evil culprit: Reader’s Digest .”

But the condensed and excerpted stories in Reader’s Digest didn’t bring about the end of attention, or of complicated storytelling. “Reader’s weren’t abandoning long stories for short ones,” writes Bilton. “The appeal of Reader’s Digest was in the overall experience.”

In 2001, David Foster Wallace—who died in the early years of the “longform” decade and whose nonfiction posthumously bears that label—reviewed a collection of prose poems. “These putatively ‘transgressive’ forms depend heavily on received ideas of genre, category, and formal conventions,” wrote Wallace, “since without such an established context there’s nothing much to transgress against.” Do away with some of those conventions and received ideas, and a genre seems more accommodating. Labels like “longform” and “prose poem” are unnecessary limitations; they may evoke a certain shape, but they also constrain it.

A few years ago, for his introduction to The Best American Magazine Writing , James Bennet wrote a short essay that later appeared online at The Atlantic , under the headline “Against ‘Long-Form Journalism.’” Bennet argues that the label is insubstantial and misleading, and then suggests “another perfectly good, honorable name for this kind of work—the one on the cover of this anthology. You might just call it all magazine writing.” But that’s like distinguishing between “book fiction” and “movie fiction,” and besides, “magazine journalism” conflates a story with a product. A medium like print may help to shape a story, but that medium is always just a tool in the service of a narrative, and media change. There will come a time when Best American Magazine Writing needs a new title.

All the stories we tell are products of limits. Time shatters histories and then hides a few pieces. Writers construct narratives and, inevitably, omit some details. Addressing the same issue in photography, Errol Morris asked, “Isn’t there always a possible elephant lurking just at the edge of the frame?” Perhaps the elephant is unimportant to the story. And yet, there he is.

Here’s the trade-off: Narratives require that we surrender our conceptions of time and space, that we readjust our ideas of what can be known and what might be said. They can be fallible by design but still leave understanding in their wake. A story, of any length, moves readers through the world without fracturing meaning. The world fractures meaning on its own.

So perhaps we can unburden ourselves of labels like “longform.” The Atavist has already begun to do just that; in 2014, the site stopped translating word counts into estimated reading times. And perhaps we can task ourselves with something more: that we read and write closer to those circumstances that bracket our lives, and simply take the time and space we need.

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9 Long Articles to Read If You're Having Trouble Getting Through Books These Days

Last month, I wrote about how I, someone who literally gets paid to read and write about books, am finding it pretty impossible to get through a book right now. One way I’ve been able to read is by prioritizing longform articles over 300-page books. Here are nine pieces I’ve found particularly compelling over the last few weeks.

8 Black-Owned Bookstores to Support Right Now (and Always)

1. “breonna Taylor’s Family And Friends Remember Her Greatness” By Eva Lewis ( teen Vogue )

On March 13, 26-year-old Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police in her home in Louisville, Kentucky. In this article, Chicago-based writer, organizer, and artist Eva Maria Lewis speaks with Taylor’s friends and family to reflect her life and the legacy she leaves behind.

2. “why You Need To Stop Saying ‘all Lives Matter’” By Rachel Elizabeth Cargle ( harper’s Bazaar )

Writer and activist Cargle wrote this piece last year, but it remains as crucial as ever. In it, she defines “Black Lives Matter” as a rallying cry for a shift in statistical numbers that show that people who are Black are twice as likely to be killed by a police officer while unarmed, compared to a white individual. Read this, then show it to a friend or family member who needs to see it.

3. “the Strange And Dangerous World Of America’s Big Cat People By Rachel Nuwer ( longreads )

If you, like much of the country, was captivated by Netflix’s Tiger King , you need to read this deep dive by Rachel Nuwer. In it, she explains how Joe Exotic’s story opened many people’s eyes to the world of America’s big cat people, and how that momentum could lead to actual reform in the industry.

4. “stewed Awakening” By Navnett Alang ( eater )

Last month, an interview with cookbook author Alison Roman in The New Consumer caused (deserved) uproar the foodisphere. Roman made some out-of-nowhere cutting remarks about fellow foodie Chrissy Teigen, as well as Marie Kondo, which…were not good. It brought to the surface a criticism of Roman and other white food stars for using “exotic" ingredients (and becoming famous as a result). Navnett Alang’s piece dives into the backlash against Roman, as well as the greater implications of food colonization.

5. “black Communities Have Always Used Food As Protest” By Amethyst Ganaway ( food & Wine )

Since the late 1500s, Black Americans have used food as a form of protest. In this fascinating history, Amethyst Ganaway writes,“Black lives lead the vanguard toward equality and revolution as they have done so many times before. We are demanding, not asking, for 'Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice And Peace.'”

6. “1,112 And Counting” By Larry Kramer ( new York Native )

Late last month, playwright and AIDS activist Larry Kramer died at 84. This landmark piece, first published in 1983, was a passionate appeal against apathy in the face of the AIDS crisis. It’s titled referred to the number of people, at the time, diagnosed with serious complications from AIDS, and it accused nearly everyone connected with health care in America, from CDC officials and doctors to local politicians, of refusing to acknowledge the implications of the growing epidemic.

7. “he Lost His Leg, Then Rediscovered The Bicycle. Now He’s Unstoppable” By Peter Flax ( bicycling )

Thirteen years ago, Leo Rodgers, now 35, lost one of his legs in a motorcycle crash. During his rehabilitation, he found that his thirst for speed and thrills, could be sated by a bicycle. He has since competed four times at the U.S. Paralympic Track Cycling Open, and came away with eight total medals. Inspiring doesn’t begin to describe it.

8. “the Science Of Sourdough Starters” By Tim Chin ( serious Eats )

Raise your hand if you or someone you know has used this time in quarantine to bake bread—lots of bread. Sourdough, in particular, has reached new levels of popularity, and this helpful article explains how it even works. Chin writes that, “You don't have to understand the science of sourdough yeasts and bacteria to bake great sourdough bread, but it sure can help.”

9. “how The Pandemic Turned Brené Brown Into America’s Therapist” By Sarah Hepola ( texas Monthly )

Brené Brown is a renowned lecturer, author and podcast host. Though her fanbase has been devoted for years, the COVID-19 pandemic has shot her to new heights, leading her to serves, essentially, as America’s therapist. But as writer Sarah Hepola finds out while profiling Brown, the fifth-generation Texan would rather not be called that.

These 7 Books on White Privilege Will Help You Better Understand Race in America

Wellness Director

Longform.org is shutting down its article recommendations service. (The Longform Podcast will continue to publish new episodes weekly.)

We started the site in April 2010 on a whim. Since then, we have recommended more than 10,000 pieces of nonfiction. It has been immensely gratifying to watch millions of readers enjoying the work of our favorite writers.

Thank you to Longform.org's contributing editors, its supporters, and the publications, writers, and readers who made it all possible. We will miss you.

-Max Linsky & Aaron Lammer, founders

Wednesday, May 8

Longform Podcast #578: Lissa Soep

Your browser does not support the audio player. Click here to download the podcast.

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.”

• [00:00] Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations that Never End (Spiegel & Grau • 2024)
• [00:00] YR Media
• [33:00] "Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans" (Sam Anderson • New York Times Magazine • Oct 2021)

May 2024 Permalink

Longform Podcast #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.”

• 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 York City? (Part 2)” (Search Engine • April 2024)
• [03:00] “When Do You Know It’s Time to Stop Drinking?” (Search Engine • Jan 2024)
• [08:00] “Why Are There So Many Chicken Bones on the Street? (Part 1)” (Search Engine • Jan 2024)
• [08:00] “Why Are There So Many Chicken Bones on the Street? (Part 2)” (Search Engine • Jan 2024)
• [13:00] “Is There a Sane Way to Use the Internet?” (Search Engine • Oct 2023)
• [15:00] “How Do You Survive Fame?” (Search Engine • Feb 2024)
• [15:00] “The Tao of Rick Rubin” (New York Times • The Ezra Klein Show • Feb 2023)
• [15:00] “Rick Rubin Says Trust Your Gut, Not Your Audience” (Bari Weiss • The Free Press • Mar 2023)
• [16:00] “Rick Rubin, The Seclusive Zen Master” (Tim Ferriss • Jan 2023)
• [16:00] “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Gay Talese • Esquire • April 1966)
• [18:00] The Ezra Klein Show
• [18:00] Fresh Air
• [19:00] Crypto Island (Jigsaw Productions • 2022)
• [26:00] “Do Political Yard Signs Actually Do Anything?” (Search Engine • Apr 2024)
• [27:00] Reply All
• [35:00] “What’s Going on With Elon Musk?” (Search Engine • July 2023)
• [38:00] “What’s It Like to Go Blind? (Search Engine • July 2023)

Longform Podcast #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 going to try.”

• [01:00] "Everywhere and Nowhere: What It’s Really Like to Be Black and Work in Fashion" (The Cut • Aug 2018)
• [09:00] The Devil Wears Prada (Fox 2000 Pictures • 2006)
• [29:00] David Haskell on Longform Podcast
• [31:00] "Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce" (Emily Gould • The Cut • Feb 2024)
• [31:00] "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger" (Charlotte Cowles • The Cut • Feb 2024)
• [31:00] "Age Gap Relationships: The Case for Marrying an Older Man" (Grazie Sophia Christie • The Cut • Mar 2024)
• [50:00] "Is There Room for Fashion Criticism in a Racist Industry?" (The Cut • Aug 2021)

Apr 2024 Permalink

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 taking this risk] because I need a bump my life? Or do you really believe in what you're doing? And I feel like I really do need to believe in the purpose of the story. There has to be some motivation greater than myself."

This is the last in a series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism .

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 past 20 minutes they’ve been speaking ill of a relative who’s actually been dead the entire time, and to hear that wave of grief and sometimes that feeling of betrayal that cropped up in their voice and how the way that they spoke to the officers afterwards changed.”

This is the fourth in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism .

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 attention .”

This is the third in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism .

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 of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

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, anywhere, as long as it’s interesting. Nobody owes us their time. The onus is on us to explain things in an interesting, compelling way. I’m hoping that a landscape opens up somewhere else that sees that and understands that can be done anywhere in the world.”

This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year’s George Polk Awards in Journalism .

Longform Podcast #575: Megan Kimble

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 of the interstate highways program that building highways through cities doesn’t fix traffic. And yet we keep doing it. To me, that really fueled a lot of the book. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”

• @megankimble
• megankimble.com
• Kimble on Longform
• Kimble’s Texas Observer archive
• [11:00] Kimble’s Austin Monthly archive
• [13:00] “Austin’s Not-So-Fair Housing Market” (Austin Monthly • Sept 2018)
• [49:00] “The Road Home” (Texas Observer • July 2021)

Longform Podcast #574: Zach Harris

“I'm not like a staff writer who has … status and access. But if I come up with something fun that you've never heard of that might connect to the larger culture, then it kind of hits a nerve and a sweet spot for me. Someone like a pro skateboarder or a pro bowler, you guys have never heard of. And so being able to present a person and a culture and a world to a wider audience, I think suits me well and has been really a fun way to do profiles.”

• [00:00] "Meet the Gen Z Hothead Burning Up Pro Bowling" (Rolling Stone • Jan 2024)
• [01:00] "The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever" (Michael J. Mooney • D Magazine • Jan 2000)
• [02:00] Longform's bowling archive
• [13:00] Harris’s Vice archive
• [26:00] Thrasher Magazine
• [28:00] Harris’s High Times archive
• [29:00] amandachicagolewis.com
• [31:00] Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Malcolm Harris • Little, Brown and Company • 2023)
• [33:00] firstwefeast.com
• [36:00] "Pandora’s Bag: Rap Snacks Are Proof that Time Is a Flat Circle" (Vice • Jun 2012)

Mar 2024 Permalink

Longform Podcast #573: Rozina Ali

Rozina Ali is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and the winner of the 2023 National Magazine Award for Reporting. Her latest article is “Raised in the West Bank, Shot in Vermont.”

“I think it’s very, very important to speak to people as people. To speak to sources—even if you have the juiciest story—to really give them the grace. I think everyone deserves it, especially people who are going through such a difficult time.”

• @rozina_ali
• rozina-ali.com
• Ali’s New York Times archive
• [16:00] “The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi” (New Yorker • Jan 2017)
• [17:00] “The ‘Herald Square Bomber’ Who Wasn’t” (New York Times Magazine • April 2021)
• [25:00] “Marijuana Comes to Coalinga” (The Nation • Nov 2018)
• [29:00] “‘How Did This Man Think He Had the Right to Adopt This Baby?’” (New York Times Magazine • Nov 2022)
• [43:00] “The Afghan Women Left Behind” (New Yorker • Aug 2022)
• [46:00] “What Rashida Tlaib Represents” (New York Times Magazine • March 2022)
• [61:00] “The ISIS Beat” (The Drift • April 2021)

Longform Podcast #572: Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson is a staff writer for The Atlantic and host of the podcast Plain English .

“I am an inveterate dilettante. I lose interest in subjects all the time. Because what I find interesting about my job is the invitation to solve mysteries. And once you solve one, two, three mysteries in a space, then the meta-mystery of that space begins to dim. And all these other subjects—that's the new unlit space that needs the flashlight. And that's the part of the job that I love the most: that there are so many dark corners in the world. And I've just got this flashlight, and I can just shine it wherever the hell I want.”

• Thompson's Atlantic archive
• [00:00] Hit Makers: How to Succeed in an Age of Distraction (Penguin • 2018)
• [00:00] Plain English with Derek Thompson (The Ringer)
• [05:00] "Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out" (Atlantic • Feb 2024)
• [18:00] "The Americans Who Need Chaos" (Atlantic • Feb 2024)
• [23:00] "America’s Loneliness Epidemic Comes for the Restaurant" (Atlantic • Mar 2024)
• [35:00] "Stop Trying to Ask 'Smart Questions'" (Atlantic • Jan 2023)
• [39:00] "The Future of Everything With Derek Thompson" (The Bill Simmons Podcast • Feb 2024)
• [40:00] "What Many Economists (and I) Got Wrong About This Economy" (Plain English • Mar 2024)
• [43:00] "How Hollywood’s Hit Formula Flopped—and What Could Come Next" (Plain English • Mar 2024)

Longform Podcast #571: Tessa Hulls

“This project is the thing I have spent my entire life running from. I was incredibly determined to never touch this, either personally or professionally. … It was more an eventual act of resignation than a desire.”

• @tessahulls
• tessahulls.com
• [17:00] Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi • Pantheon • 2004)
• [19:00] richardscarry.com
• [32:00] The Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency
• [36:00] “Longform Podcast #144: Cheryl Strayed”

February 28

Longform Podcast #570: Sloane Crosley

Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and several other books. Her new memoir is Grief Is for People .

“You take a little sliver of yourself and you offer it up to be spun around in perpetuity in the public imagination. That is the sacrifice you make. And it makes everything just a little bit worse. So it's the opposite of catharsis, but it's worth it. It's worth it for what you get in return: a book.”

• sloanecrosley.com
• Longform Podcast #343: Sloane Crosley
• [01:00] Grief Is for People (MCD • 2024)
• [14:00] Heartburn (Nora Ephron • Vintage • 1996)
• [25:00] "Patchett: In Bad Relationships, 'There Comes A Day When You Gotta Go.'" (Fresh Air with Terry Gross • WHYY • Jan 2014)
• [25:00] Joan Didion on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
• [25:00] "Long COVID, Chronic Illness & Searching For Answers" (Fresh Air with Terry Gross • WHYY • Feb 2022)
• [32:00] "Obituary: Russell Perreault, V-P at Vintage Anchor, 52" (Rachel Deahl • Publishers Weekly • Jul 2019)
• [37:00] The Clasp (Picador • 2016)
• [49:00] How Did You Get This Number (Riverhead Books • 2011)
• [51:00] "Five O’Clock Somewhere" (Gary Indiana • Granta • Feb 2024)

Feb 2024 Permalink

February 21

Longform Podcast #569: Lauren Markham

“It took me a while to figure out that this is actually a book about storytelling, about journalistic storytelling, about the kind of myths we spin culturally and politically, about history, about current events, and the role of journalism within all of that, and my role as a journalist.”

• @LaurenMarkham_
• laurenmarkham.info
• Markham on Longform
• [01:00] The Far Away Brothers (Crown • 2018)
• [03:00] oaklandinternational.org
• [28:00] How the Word Is Passed (Clint Smith • Little, Brown and Company • 2021)
• [38:00] “How Greece Secretly Adopted the World’s Most Brazen—and Brutal—Way of Keeping Out Refugees” (Mother Jones • March 2022)
• [44:00] “For Me, With Love and Squalor” (Longreads • June 2018)

February 14

Longform Podcast #568: Zoë Schiffer

Zoë Schiffer is the managing editor for Platformer . Her new book is Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter .

“Being the person where it's a fireable offense to leak to you … is kind of a badge of honor.”

• zoeschiffer.com
• Schiffer's Platformer archive
• Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter (Portfolio • 2024)
• [03:00] Schiffer's Verge archive
• [08:00] "How Twitter’s child porn problem ruined its plans for an OnlyFans competitor" (Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton • Verge • Aug 2022)
• [16:00] Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Michael Lewis • W. W. Norton • 2023)
• [36:00] Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ashlee Vance • Ecco • 2017)
• [41:00] Ask a Swole Woman (Casey Johnston)

Longform Podcast #566: Patricia Evangelista

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler , Esquire , and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country .

“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”

• Evangelista's Rappler archive
• Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country (Random House • 2023)
• [01:00] The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2020)
• [11:00] Evangelista's Philippine Daily Inquirer archive
• [21:00] "The Rapture of Rodrigo Duterte" (Patricia Evangelista and Nicole Curato • Rappler • May 2016)

Jan 2024 Permalink

Longform Podcast #565: Susan B. Glasser

“There’s a great benefit to leaving Washington and then coming back, or frankly leaving anywhere and then coming back. I think you have much wider open eyes. Washington, like a lot of company towns, takes on a logic of its own, and things that can seem crazy to the rest of the country, to the rest of the world, somehow end up making more sense than they should when you’re just doing that all day long, every day.”

• Glasser on Longform
• Glasser’s New Yorker archive
• [05:00] “The Year We Stopped Being Able to Pretend About Trump” (New Yorker • Dec 2023)
• [16:00] Glasser’s Politico archive
• [20:00] The Man Who Ran Washington (Glasser and Peter Baker • Anchor • 2021)
• [28:00] Peter Baker's New York Times archive
• [29:00] Kremlin Rising (Glasser and Peter Baker • Scribner • 2005)
• [37:00] Theo Baker on the Longform Podcast

Longform Podcast #564: Rob Copeland

Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The New York Times . His recent book is The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend .

“If I stab you, I'm going to stab you in the chest, not the back. You're going to see it coming. ... But if you're going to tell me something's wrong, you have to keep talking. I'm not going to take your word for it. I have a reason for why I believe my reporting to be true, and I'm going to present it to you as best I can. But just because you say something's wrong doesn't make it so.”

• @realrobcopeland
• Copeland's New York Times archive
• Copeland’s Wall Street Journal archive
• [02:00] The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend (St. Martin’s Press • 2023)
• [20:00] The Vow (HBO)
• [27:00] Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyou • Vintage • 2020)
• [29:00] "#557: Adam Grant" (Longform Podcast • Nov 2023)
• [29:00] Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Adam Grant • Penguin Books • 2017)
• [31:00] "Elon Musk Says He Lives in a $50,000 House. He Doesn’t Talk About the Austin Mansion." (Wall Street Journal • Dec 2021)
• [37:00] Principles: Life and Work (Ray Dalio • Avid Reader Press • 2017)
• [46:00] Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Michael Lewis • W. W. Norton & Company • 2023)

Longform Podcast #563: Miles Johnson

“I’m really fascinated always by the ways in which people just have to do really boring parts of running a crime organization … I love the banalities of this stuff. We have a fictionalized version of crime groups and it’s obviously glamorous, and they’re really smart, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s bumbling incompetence as well or just quite unglamorous.”

• @MilesMJohnson
• Johnson’s Financial Times archive
• [06:00] Johnson’s Guardian archive
• [07:00] Paul Murphy’s Financial Times archive
• [9:00] “How the Mafia Infiltrated Italy’s Hospitals and Laundered the Profits Globally” (Financial Times • July 2020)
• [14:00] “The Mystery of the Mogul, the Casino and the Heist that Rocked Mayfair” (Financial Times • May 2022)

December 20, 2023

Longform Podcast #562: Daisy Alioto

Daisy Alioto is a journalist and the CEO of Dirt Media .

“I don't think I was ever super precious about my writing, but if I was, I'm zero percent precious about it now. Every time I write for Dirt , it saves the company money. ... Nothing will make you sit down and write 800 words in 20 minutes than just needing to get it done. And that is a change that I've seen in myself. I would encourage everyone to be less precious about their writing.”

• daisyalioto.com
• [00:00] Dirt
• [09:00] "Marie Colvin’s Private War" (Marie Brenner • Vanity Fair • Jul 2012)
• [09:00] A Private War (Acacia Filmed Entertainment, Savvy Media Holdings, Thunder Road Pictures • 2018)
• [05:00] Airmail
• [11:00] "Pretend it’s a living" (Dirt • Jan 2021)
• [15:00] Prune
• [16:00] Hung Up (Hunter Harris)
• [16:00] Maybe Baby (Hayley Nahman)
• [16:00] Today in Tabs (Rusty Foster)
• [16:00] Blackbird Spyplane (Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie)
• [16:00] Singal-Minded (Jesse Singal)
• [17:00] "The Complete History & Strategy of LVMH" (Acquired • Feb 2023)
• [24:00] "Grizzly man" (Amelia K. • Dirt • Jun 2023)
• [24:00] "The Question of U" (Amelia K. • Dirt • Nov 2023)
• [25:00] "Diary of a chess tournament" (Akram Herrak • Dirt • Nov 2023)
• [25:00] "The sound of your voice" (Joann Plockova • Dirt • Nov 2023)
• [25:00] "For the love of chickens" (Tove Danovich • Dirt • Sep 2023)
• [26:00] "Bad waitress" (Becca Schuh • Dirt • Jun 2023)
• [28:00] "Užupis Utopia" (Playboy • Dec 2019)
• [35:00] Someone Who Isn’t Me (Geoff Rickly • Rose Books • 2023)
• [37:00] Fragantica
• [37:00] "Bottle Elizabeth Taylor" (Daisy Alioto • Dirt • Jun 2023)
• [39:00] The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Essays on Desire and Consumption (Katy Kelleher • Simon & Schuster • 2023)
• [41:00] Scent + Song (Vivian Medithi)
• [44:00] Axios
• [44:00] The Information
• [44:00] Punchbowl News
• [44:00] The Ankler
• [44:00] Semafor

Dec 2023 Permalink

December 13, 2023

Longform Podcast #561: Ian Coss

Ian Coss is a journalist, audio producer, and composer. He is the host of Forever is a Long Time and The Big Dig .

“One thing that I really carried with me in making the show is a belief that bureaucracy is interesting. And that once you get through the jargon and wonky sounding stuff … beyond that it’s all just human drama.”

• iancoss.com
• [32:00] Isabel Hibbard’s website
• [33:00] Forever is a Long Time (PRX • 2021)
• [37:00] Lacy Roberts’ website

December 6, 2023

Longform Podcast #560: Mosi Secret

Mosi Secret has written for ProPublica , The New York Times Magazine , and GQ . His new podcast is Radical .

“I think this story made me call on parts of myself that are not journalistic because I don’t really think that’s the way we’re going to get out of this at this point in my life. I think that it takes a more radical reimagining of who we are as human beings, the ways in which we’re connected, and what we owe to each other. And that’s not a reporting thing—that’s a ‘who are you’ kind of thing.”

• mosisecret.com
• Secret on Longform
• Secret’s New York Times archive
• [10:00] “Stolen Youth: How Durham's Criminal Justice System Sent Erick Daniels to Prison Based on the Shape of His Eyebrows” (INDYWeek • May 2007)
• [18:00] “On the Brink in Brownsville” (New York Times Magazine • May 2014)
• [21:00] “‘The Way to Survive It Was to Make A’s’” (New York Times Magazine • September 2017)
• [23:00] Johnny Kauffman’s website
• [28:00] “Having a Drink With Mosi Secret, the New York Times’ First-Ever Sin and Vice Reporter” (Joe Coscarelli • New York Magazine • June 2014)
• [29:00] “Behind the Red Door” (New York Times • May 2014)
• [38:00] “The Real 'CSI': How America’s Patchwork System of Death Investigations Puts the Living at Risk” (A.C. Thompson • ProPublica • Feb 2011)

November 22, 2023

Longform Podcast #559: Craig Mod

“There'll be days where … I’m doing a walk and I'll just be like, I don't know what is going to move me today. And then out of the blue, there'll be this small interaction that when you really pay attention to it, it contains kind of this universe of kindness and patience that you otherwise pass by or ignore. If you're in the general mode of looking at things and then being able to take that experience and try to transmute it into an essay for the evening and send it out, it just develops your eye. You just start being able to look more and more and more closely.”

• craigmod.com
• Things Become Other Things (Fine art edition • 2023 // Hardcover edition • Random House • 2025)
• Roden (Newsletter)
• Ridgeline (Newsletter)
• [1:00] Mod on Longform Podcast
• [6:30] Koya Bound: Eight Days on the Kumano Kodō (with Dan Rubin • PRE/POST • 2016)
• [16:00] Kiiiiiiiiiiiiii (Pop Up Newsletter)
• [16:00] Special Projects (Newsletter)
• [20:00] Kissa by Kissa (2020)
• [31:00] Pachinko Road (Pop Up Newsletter)
• [32:00] "I Walked 600 Miles Across Japan for Pizza Toast" (Eater • Dec 2019)
• [32:00] "The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan" (Wired • May 2019)
• [45:00] Longform Podcast #533: Hua Hsu (May 2023)

Nov 2023 Permalink

November 15, 2023

Longform Podcast #558: Mona Chalabi

Mona Chalabi is a writer and illustrator whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The New Yorker , and The Guardian , where she is the data editor. Her New York Times Magazine piece “9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting.

“I kind of think of protest as just saying what you believe. And sometimes, it’s considered protest because it’s outside of the institutions of power. So you’re saying, Hey, Palestinians deserve human rights, and that’s considered a form of protest, right? I want the work to change things and I think I’m quite unapologetic about that, and most journalists are like No no no no no, we’re just reporting the world, we’re just reporting things as we see it. There’s no desire for change. I think that is so messed up. This idea that your work has no impact in the world is incorrect. You can’t wash yourself of the consequences of the work, you have to be considering the consequences while you’re doing it.”

• monachalabi.com
• Chalabi on Instagram
• Chalabi's Guardian archive
• [1:00] "9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos' Wealth" (New York Times Magazine • Apr 2022)
• [1:00] "How Does the Reality TV Show Cops Stack Up with Real-Life Crime Figures?" (The Guardian • May 2019)
• [6:00] "Striving For Justice: Lowkey in Conversation with Mona Chalabi" (GQ • Jun 2023)
• [8:30] "NY Times Writers Jazmine Hughes & Jamie Keiles Resign After Signing Letter Against Israeli War on Gaza" (Democracy Now! • Nov 2023)
• [8:30] Samira Nasr on Instagram
• [8:30] "Inside MSNBC’s Middle East Conflict" (Max Tani • Semafor • Oct 2023)
• [16:00] "Mentions of Israeli and Palestinian Deaths in The New York Times " (Instagram • Oct 2023)
• [18:00] "Circumcision Rates" (Instagram • Oct 2025)
• [21:00] New America Fellow
• [21:00] Emerson Collective
• [21:00] "The Gray-Green Divide" (Brooklyn Museum • Jun-Dec 2022)
• [21:00] "Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi" (TED Audio Collective)
• [54:00] Muntadhar al-Zaidi
• [54:00] Longform Podcast #276: Azmat Khan
• [54:00] Yousur Al-Hlou's New York Times archive
• [54:00] Jazmine Hughes' New York Times archive
• [54:00] “Regarding the Pain of Others” (Marty Peretz • The New Republic • 1996)
• [54:00] Longform Podcast #553: Clare Malone

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Morning After the Revolution review: a bad faith attack on ‘woke’

Nellie Bowles seeks simply to stoke ‘communal outrage’, whether over protesters, the unhoused or trans people

W riting on Substack in 2021 , Nellie Bowles described some of the less attractive qualities that motivated her work as a reporter: “I love the warm embrace of the social media scrum. One easy path toward the top of the list … is communal outrage. Toss something (someone) into that maw, and it’s like fireworks. I have mastered that game. For a couple of years, that desire for attention … propelled me more than almost anything else. I began to see myself less as a mirror and more as a weapon.”

Bowles is married to Bari Weiss, a former editor on the opinion section of the New York Times whose furious resignation letter earned her encomiums from Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump Jr.

But Bowles wrote that her decision to convert to the faith of her Jewish wife had actually softened her approach to journalism: “I want to cultivate my empathy not my cruelty. I am trying to go back to being closer to the mirror than the knife.”

However, her new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, is dazzling proof she is completely incapable of changing her approach to her profession.

Bowles is a former tech reporter for outlets including the Guardian and the New York Times . For many reporters, the decision to write a book comes from wanting to dig deeper into a particular subject, or a desire for freedom from the restrictions of one’s former employer. For Bowles, longform turns out to be the chance to jettison the standards of accuracy of her previous employers in favor of the wildest possible generalizations.

Here are a few fine examples: “The best feminists of my generation were born with dicks.” This is the author’s jaunty description of trans women, who, she informs us, are “the best, boldest” and “fiercest feminists”, who unfortunately – according to her – have concluded “that to be a woman is, in general, disgusting”.

On the ninth page of Bowles’s introduction, meanwhile, readers realize how much we must have underestimated the universal impact of the movement to Defund the Police. Did you know, for example, that “if you want to be part of the movement for universal healthcare … you cannot report critically on #DefundThePolice”?

Bowles identifies a similar problem with marriage equality: “If you want to be part of a movement that supports gay marriage … then you can’t question whatever disinformation is spread that week.”

The wilder the idea, the more likely Bowles is to include it, almost always in a way that can never be checked. To prove the vile effect of wokeness on the entire news business, she informs us that colleagues “at major news organizations” have “told me roads and birds are racist. Voting is racist. Exercise is super-racist. Worrying about plastic in the water is transphobic.” And a “cohort” took it “as gospel when a nice white lady said that being on time and objectivity were white values, and this was a progressive belief”.

Writing about a tent city in Echo Park, Los Angeles , Bowles explains why nobody living there was interested in a free hotel room: “Residents could not do drugs in the rooms. And the rooms were, of course, indoors. People high on meth and fentanyl prefer being outdoors, with no rules, with their friends.”

Predictably, the book reaches a whole new level of viciousness when it reveals Bowles’ attitude toward trans people.

Intelligent people know three essential facts about the debate over whether children under 18 should have access to hormones or surgery to make their bodies conform to the gender in which they think they belong.

First, a large majority of trans people of all ages never take hormones or get surgery. Second, nearly all of those who do choose to use medicine to alter their bodies report a dramatic improvement in personal happiness. Third, a very small number of those who have undergone surgery or taken hormones to block puberty do change their minds and opt for de-transition.

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Naturally, Bowles mentions none of those facts. According to her narrative, “the transition from Black Lives Matter to Trans Lives Matter was seamless … I don’t think this was planned or orchestrated. The movement simply pivoted.”

No mention, of course, of polls conducted by Christian nationalists and their allies which determined that the best new fundraising tool would be an all-out attack on trans people, including the denial of their very existence, as well as the introduction of hundreds of bills in state legislatures across the country to make this tiny minority as miserable as possible.

Instead, Bowles wants us to believe the debate is dominated by websites you might not have heard of, like Fatherly, which asserts: “All kids, regardless of their gender identity, start to understand their own gender typically by the age of 18 to 24 months.” One parent who appeared on PBS in 2023 is equally important in Bowles’s book, because she said her child started to let her parents know “she was transgender really before she could even speak”.

Needless to say, Bowles is horrified that as America became more aware of the existence of trans people, the number of clinics available to treat them grew to 60 by 2023. Then she makes another remarkable claim: “If a parent resists” medical changes requested by a child, “they can and do lose custody of their child.”

Is that true? I have no idea. If Bowles had written that sentence in the Times or the Guardian, her editor would most certainly have requested some sort of proof. Fortunately for her – but unfortunately for us – her publisher , a new Penguin Random House imprint, Thesis, does not appear to impose any outdated fact-checking requirements. The only visible standard here is, if it’s shocking, we’ll print it.

Morning After the Revolution is published in the US by Thesis

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• US politics
• LGBTQ+ rights

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Opinion Our daughter wanted a mommy, so she picked one of her dads

Are women really the only people who can be maternal?

Richard Just is managing editor for longform at NOTUS and former editor of The Washington Post Magazine.

Sometime last fall, our oldest daughter, then 3½ years old, began telling us she wanted a mom. My husband and I, two men, had known this moment might come. We had done everything we could to lay the groundwork for her and her little sister to feel pride in our nontraditional family: We’d stocked up on two-dad children’s books and recounted many times the story of how they’d come into the world with the help of a generous egg donor and an amazing surrogate. But, at least for our older daughter, none of these preventive measures had seemed to soften the blow of realizing that every other kid she knew had a mom.

For a week or two, she seemed genuinely upset. But then came a twist that neither my husband nor I expected: She announced that she would now call my husband “mommy.” And that, in her mind, seemed to settle it: Almost as quickly as she had become fixated on not having a mother, her funk seemed to lift, and she was back to being the energetic, funny, smart kid we had always known.

I was happy she was once again happy, but I wasn’t quite sure what we should do about this change in title. Was it okay to let her bend reality this way? Wasn’t this too big a concession to heteronormativity? Shouldn’t we teach our kids to be proud that they are part of an LGBT family, rather than letting them sweep those differences under the rug?

My husband, though, had no ambivalence: If this was what our daughter needed, then he was going with it. I saw the logic in that — and, anyway, it was his title and therefore his decision.

So we embarked on a new era — no longer Papa and Daddy but now Mommy and Daddy. At first, I thought it might turn out to be a quickly forgotten phase, but our daughter — in a way that was entirely in keeping with her personality and that I had to admit I truly admired — made it clear she was digging in: Any time I slipped up and referred to him as Papa, she swiftly corrected me.

Pretty soon, she began to police my husband’s pronouns as well. Initially, I had tried to pair his new Mommy title with the male pronouns that he uses — a small concession to reality, I guess — but it wasn’t long before our daughter began to insist that he be referred to as she and her. She had always evinced traits of a future copy editor — from an early age, if we missed or mangled a word in a story she had memorized, she was quick to let us know — and now she directed the full force of her editorial judgment at any deviations from the gender identity she had chosen for her mom-father. “She!” she would gruffly instruct me, as I unthinkingly mis-mis-gendered the man I had been married to for 10 years. “Why do you say ‘he’?”

To hammer home the point, she began every so often calling him “she-mother,” a title my husband delighted in. Occasionally, she would generously say that I, too, could be a “she-mother,” and she would have two moms.

People thought all of this was weird — or at least, I think they did, since just about everyone was too polite to say anything. As soon as she used the word “mommy” in public, I would hurry — a little embarrassed, a little proud — to explain the situation to whomever we were with. Her nursery-school teachers were, needless to say, confused. Then again, when Mother’s Day preparations began at school, things were simple. Her teachers the previous year had, after consulting us, rebranded the holiday as Parents’ Day — a gesture we really appreciated — but this time we required no special accommodation. Mother’s Day would proceed uninterrupted, since our daughter now had a mother.

But did she? That was the question — or a version of it — that I have kept turning over in my head these past months. If a mother is simply a woman who is raising a child, then, no, our daughters do not have one. But are women really the only people who can be maternal? Why can’t the roles that were historically assigned to mothers be fulfilled by parents — or loved ones — of any kind?

These should be obvious points in 2024, but in four years as a gay dad, I’ve been struck by how much unnecessary gendering still exists around families and parenting, even in our liberal East Coast community: the local Spanish-language program that’s advertised as “Mommy and Me,” the email to me and other class parents that started “Hi class moms!” I don’t stew about these things — there are never, as far as I can tell, any bad intentions involved — but I worry about the message regarding gender roles that’s being delivered to our kids. And I wonder about the messages being sent to other parents, of all types. What about nonbinary parents who aren’t reflected in the mom-dad dichotomy? What about straight dads who seem to be getting an implicit directive: Don’t function too much like a stereotypical mom?

Our experiences, I realize, play into many culture-war topics du jour. But we are people, not ideological concepts. My husband and I are nothing more and nothing less than two parents who would do anything for their kids — including, at least for now, reconsidering the terms we use to describe our family and ourselves.

In the end, I’ve come to believe our daughter has been telling us something beautiful and profound: that she has everything she needs — including those attributes that society has normally treated as the provenance of mothers — right here in her two-dad family. And so, on this Mother’s Day, I am filled with gratitude — to my wise and spirited daughter, for challenging me to rethink labels that I never imagined I would question, and to my husband, for being the best she-mother a kid could ever have.

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Critic’s notebook

‘The Sympathizer’ Opens a Counteroffensive on Vietnam War Movies

HBO’s series is not just a good story. It’s a sharp piece of film criticism.

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By James Poniewozik

HBO has long defined itself in contrast to mainstream television — “It’s not TV,” as the slogan goes — but in many ways its history is one of revising and responding to the movies. “The Sopranos” updated the mafia movie (and its characters quoted, and were influenced by, films like “The Godfather”). “Game of Thrones” dirtied up the high-fantasy genre; “Deadwood” the Western; “Watchmen” the superhero story.

But the network has never given us its longform version of, or rebuttal to, one Hollywood staple: the Vietnam War movie (unless one counts the alternative history aspects of “Watchmen”). Until now, with “The Sympathizer,” Park Chan-wook’s kinetic and darkly hilarious adaptation (with the co-showrunner Don McKellar) of the novel by the Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen.

The seven-episode series is many things. It’s an exploration of dual identity: The protagonist, known only as the Captain ( Hoa Xuande ), is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent planted as an aide to the General (Toan Le), a leader of the South Vietnamese secret police. It’s a spy thriller, a satire of colonialism and its many faces — many of them Robert Downey Jr.’s — and an exploration of the complications of love and memory.

But it’s also an intense dialogue and argument with the movies. It is simultaneously its own Vietnam War movie, bold, inventive and sometimes bloody, as well as a pointed, detailed work of movie criticism.

In “The Sympathizer,” which began airing in April, the movies are a continuation of war by other means. Its fixation on film begins early. Retelling his story in a postwar re-education camp — the framing device for the series — the Captain recalls watching the vicious interrogation of a communist agent on the stage of a movie theater, where the marquee sign for “Emmanuelle” is coming down, and the one for Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” is hoisted into place. Even in Hollywood’s dream vision, beauty gives way to an American pointing an oversized gun.

“Hollywood” is a metonym for America in “The Sympathizer”; it is the country’s front door, its export and its weapon. The Captain’s C.I.A. contact, Claude (Downey), lectures his “protégé” (who he is unaware is a communist) about American pop culture, expounding to him about the Isley Brothers and the Herbie Hancock score for “Death Wish.” Later, Claude tells him about the C.I.A.’s interest in keeping tabs on film directors: “As long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism but with no actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless.”

For Nguyen, who came to the United States with his family in 1975, the movies were potent and personal. “I grew up when America was fighting its war in Vietnam all over again, this time onscreen,” he recalled in a 2022 commencement speech. “Vietnam was our country and this was our war, and yet our only place in American movies was to be killed, raped, threatened or rescued.”

The adaptation of his novel dramatizes this in its centerpiece fourth episode, which premiered Sunday. The Captain, sent to America after the war to keep an eye on the General in exile, is hired as a consultant for “The Hamlet,” an “Apocalypse Now”–like film by a blowhard American auteur, Nikos, again played by Downey. (Downey also plays an academic peddling theories about the “Oriental” mind-set and a right-wing politician who displays a photo of himself with John Wayne, whose “The Green Berets” tried to rouse support for the war.)

The filming takes the Captain into 1970s Hollywood’s heart of dimness. Nikos proclaims that he’s making “The Hamlet” to give voice to the Vietnamese people’s pain, but he neglects to give his Vietnamese characters any dialogue. When he agrees to add lines for them, he runs into the small problem that none of the extras hired to play the villagers are Vietnamese or speak the language.

(The multiple casting of Downey, by the way, is arguably a visual riff on this history of the movies treating Asians in general, and Vietnamese in particular, as interchangeable: Every aspect of imperialism, it conveys, is the same face in different makeup. But in a series that’s meant to foreground the Vietnamese in their own story, the device is showy and distracting because … well, it’s a whole lot of Robert Downey Jrs.)

The Captain volunteers to solve the problem, rounding up a group of Vietnamese expats to fill the extra roles, including his friend Bon (Fred Nguyen Khan), who proves to have a talent for getting killed, repeatedly, in a variety of costumes and makeup.

But the Captain’s solution introduces its own complications. His refugee extras, who fled the communists, don’t want to play Viet Cong onscreen. “Why do we make art,” the Captain pleads with them, “if not to explore the full complexity of life?” His speech doesn’t persuade anyone, but an offer of an extra $10 in pay does.

Park, the director of the relentless and sanguinary “Oldboy,” is an apt fit for this story, able to both render the thrill of actual action and satirize the absurdity of action moviemaking. (Park and McKellar wrote the fourth episode, which is directed by Fernando Meirelles.) On set, the Captain meets a Korean American actor (played by John Cho), whose résumé includes characters of multiple Asian ethnicities who have been beaten to death by Robert Mitchum, stabbed by Ernest Borgnine and shot by Frank Sinatra. An overbearing method actor (David Duchovny) plays his role as a war criminal with disturbing fidelity.

The episode builds to the movie-within-a-show’s climax, the rape of a village woman whom Nikos has named for the Captain’s mother. Though Nikos considers it a “tribute,” the Captain is appalled. (“You should be thanking me!” Nikos complains.) It’s too much for the Captain, whom Xuande plays as a man expert at mastering his emotions and his affect. He is fired and breaks up the scene’s shooting, and while leaving the set, he’s injured in a pyrotechnic blast meant to simulate an airstrike against the Vietnamese hamlet.

The Captain survives the devastation of his country only to be blown up by the simulacrum of the war he escaped. But Nikos gets the explosions he needs, and “The Hamlet” is released into the world.

“This movie is trash,” a Vietnamese character later says philosophically, “but that’s only from our perspective. He’s an American, and from an American perspective, it’s pretty progressive.”

This theme — perspectives and the lenses that express and determine them — is what makes “The Sympathizer” both an ingenious critique of war movies and an inventive war story of its own. The series opens with a statement displayed onscreen: “All wars are fought twice / The first time on the battlefield / the second time in memory.” Sly and passionate, “The Sympathizer” joins this battle on a third front: in the pictures.

James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. More about James Poniewozik

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