The Longform Episodes We Won’t Forget
With the long-running journalism podcast coming to an end, we asked media people to tell us the episodes they can’t get out of their heads.
After almost 590 episodes, the Longform podcast is winding down operations and will publish a final dispatch next month. A great run! Hosted by the trio of Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff, the show spent the past dozen years reliably pumping out interviews with journalists, authors, editors, critics, writers, essayists, interviewers, photojournalists, and artists of various stripes — even podcasters, radio hosts, and documentarians — who specialize in serious nonfiction work. The sheer scale of the archive it leaves behind is dazzling.
The broader Longform project spanned multiple forms. It was originally a website, started in 2010, which curated and linked out to what the team deemed as the best of longform-text journalism: features, profiles, investigations, and so on. At one point, the site spun out an app, back when seemingly the entire universe was fighting for smartphone real estate. The app was discontinued in 2017, and sadly, the site stopped the curation service after 2021. But its most beloved contribution was perhaps always the podcast, which saw Lammer, Linsky, and Ratliff dive into the nitty-gritty of their guests’ interiority: process, purpose, self-perception.
As interviewers, the three men had slightly different flavors. To paint things overly broadly: Ratliff was a classicist, Lammer was offbeat, and Linsky was an unabashed feelings guy. But all three were linked by a persistent interest in the people who are drawn to do this strange work. It’s not an understatement to say that Longform was a vital resource for, and record of, American nonfiction across its myriad forms, not just for those who work in the practice but also for those who aspire to join it. I happened upon the Longform podcast accidentally in 2013, during a lost year in grad school and long before I ever entertained the notion of working in the media. I can’t imagine ever having fallen in love with the biz without it.
The trio continued publishing interviews even as they kept going down their individual paths. Linsky co-founded a podcast studio, Pineapple Street, which was eventually sold off to a radio company. Lammer, already a professional musician with Francis and the Lights when Longform started, had a brief sojourn into professional crypto trading. Ratliff, who had also co-founded another media start-up, the publishing platform Atavist, by the time the podcast rolled around, stayed the course as a journalist. Both Lammer and Ratliff also made their own forays into narrative audio: the former with Exit Scam in 2021, and the latter with Persona: The French Deception in 2022. Ratliff is due to launch a new series early next month.
But it’s hard, I suppose, to keep something going for a long time. Plus, the world around Longform has changed plenty as well. You might’ve noticed that the news, publishing, digital, and media businesses are going through all sorts of crises. Who knows what is stable and what’s going to be around a few years from now; this is true both for the places that produce the work honored by Longform and the actual work of nonfiction storytelling itself. Indeed, if you were an enterprising young person with aspirations for telling good and real stories in interesting ways, it’s a little unclear where you should go today.
One place I’d definitely point you to, though, is back to the Longform archive. Nothing can keep going forever, but perhaps what’s left behind can be preserved. What Longform has created is a historical record of American nonfiction that’s so monumental it should really be housed at a university somewhere. I can only dream of it staying up forever.
To commemorate the end of a great run, we reached out to a few media people and Longform heads to talk about their favorite episodes. (And if you’re curious, most of my own favorites are linked above.)
Vann R. Newkirk II, Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Host of Floodlines and Holy Week
The first Longform pod I ever even listened to was No. 97, Ta-Nehisi Coates on “The Case for Reparations.” For me, that episode’s discussion of craft and of the expectations of writing for and about Black people was one of the main inspirations that drove me to consider working as a journalist full time. I’m dyslexic and wasn’t a very good writer but loved reporting. So, Ta-Nehisi’s argument that all of the best essays and journalism are based on rigorous reporting really moved me. It’s a piece of advice I still give my mentees today.
Newkirk II appeared on the show in 2023.
Reyhan Harmanci, Special Projects at Bloomberg
There are so many great, serious craft-based things you can get out of listening to Longform, like how writers get their ideas, how many different approaches to editing exist, the pain of listening to your own voice on interview tape, and so on. And then there’s the reason I listened to Longform: to make judgments about future bosses. I would go on to work for Anna Holmes in the fall of 2016, but I felt like I first met her through this 2015 podcast episode and hung on to every word. It’s like so many Longform episodes where you get the sense that the two interlocutors know each other but are being generous enough to let you into their smart conversation. Just a delight!
Pablo Torre, Host of Pablo Torre Finds Out
The episode I still think of is Michael Pollan’s. He told Max that human consciousness is a “windshield” that’s so clean that you don’t even notice it until it gets smudged, or cracked, by psychedelics. It was a clarifying bit of conversation that stowed away in my brain. Longform was really good at producing those.
Torre appeared twice on the show, in 2016 and 2022.
Jaime Lowe, Author of Mental, Digging for Dirt, and Breathing Fire
Hard not to choose the one with Matt Power. The episode is an audio record of a way-too-soon-passed-away writer with endless curiosity and generosity. Having his voice forever trapped in resin is both heartbreaking and so lucky. It does what Longform does best, gets the behind the scenes of process and shows how perseverance and care drives a fully realized narrative and how a person can typify what human interest is.
Jon Caramanica, Pop Music Critic at the New York Times and Host of Popcast
Can I cheat and pick two? First is the gobsmackingly great critic Margo Jefferson, who left the Times a couple of years before I arrived, and whose allergy to received (and comfortable) wisdom, I learned during this episode, was as pure in speech as in writing, and delivered with a calm verging on nervy. And the second would be Joe Sexton, a former Times editor I knew glancingly (though I could tell he was from Brooklyn without ever having to ask). It’s a blissfully profane chat about commitment, vision, durability, and navigating institutions with savvy and grace. And also a reminder that next to every great writer is an editor saying “Yes, go for it, make it great.”
Caramanica appeared on the show in 2018.
Tomi Obaro, Culture Editor at New York Magazine
Episode 101, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah
I really liked the one with Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah pegged to her Dave Chappelle piece; it was how I figured I wanted to work with Karolina Waclawiak, who edited that story.
Jesse David Fox, Vulture writer, Host of Good One, and Author of Comedy Book
At first I listened to Longform hoping to learn how to do my job from more experienced journalists, but I ended up being much more influenced by just the fact that it was a podcast interviewing people about their creative jobs. But then I started listening to it again, religiously, as I was finishing up my book. I thought about the questions the hosts asked and how I would hypothetically answer them. I would try the writers’ answers out in my mind, cosplaying as different types of authors, seeing what felt natural. So, when they had Chuck Klosterman on, I was particularly curious as his books were largely why I became a culture writer in the first place.
But then something else happened. Toward the end of the conversation, Klosterman was asked about something he had said on another podcast about the difficulty of parenting during the pandemic, and Klosterman, to paraphrase, said that during difficult moments with his kids he liked to imagine he was actually himself on his deathbed at age 90 given access to a sort of time machine that could take him back to any moment of his life. And despite, or possibly because of, how difficult they are, it was these moments of intense closeness to his children that he chose to relive. I was about to become a father myself when I listened to this episode and have thought about this idea every single day of my life since.
Fox appeared on the show in 2023.
Delia Cai, Author of Deez Links
Longform was where you found out who’s humble and who isn’t (laudatory). I remember Kara’s because she was like, “Graydon wanted me to go to V.F. because he said he’d make me a star. But I’m already a star!” And I remember being, like, wow.
Cai appeared on the show in 2023.
Dan Taberski, Host of the Headlong audio docs, 9/12, and the upcoming Hysterical
A couple eps I like. Willa Paskin: Most creators on the show play it super sober, but Willa just busts in there and has more fun than anyone ever. She reminds you that this work can be a total joy; what are we all grimacing about? Parul Seghal: Fuck, she’s smart. And the one, of course, where Max was accidentally high on edibles.
Taberski appeared on the show in 2018.
Sam Fragoso, Host of Talk Easy
Episode 187, Elizabeth Gilbert
I remember being on the BART, sophomore year of college, listening to early episodes with Elizabeth Gilbert and Ariel Levy, completely enthralled and moved by the vulnerability of the tape. Those two always stayed with me.
Same with George Saunders’s, which I think was recorded in the back of a McNally Jackson. I have some memory of a landline that wouldn’t stop ringing, which is the kind of detail some podcasts (maybe one less attuned to the moment, or to the idiosyncrasies of two strangers talking in a cramped office) would cut out. But the team kept it in. (I shamelessly incorporated some of that tape in my first talk with Saunders back in 2021.)
And before we go (because who knows when we’ll get to do this again), I have to mention the episode with Renata Adler. I remember her charm, her wit, her rapport with Max. She was persnickety and cutting in ways only a 75-year-old can get away with (on the record that is).
I didn’t know at the time that it was an example of the work I wanted so badly to make and put into the world. But relistening, the influence is clear. It’s an episode that excavates Renata’s past efforts while delicately trying to capture (and understand) the woman and writer she is today. If you’re not careful, those conversations can quickly turn into the ones Tony Soprano despises. Remember when … But when executed properly, there are few experiences (both as host and listener) more satisfying.
Fragoso appeared on the show in 2023.
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