I Want to Write About John McPhee

Sam Anderson is a writer for New York Times Magazine and the author of Boom Town.

“I love being in that place where everything is just coming in, and everything is potentially important, and I’m underlining every great sentence that John McPhee has ever written and then I’m typing it up into this embarrassingly long set of reading notes, documents, organized by books. And then when you sit down with it as a writer who has a job, and his job is to fill a little window of a magazine or website, all of that ecstatic inhaling has to stop. You realize that you’ve collected approximately 900,000% of what you need or could ever use.”

Show notes:

• @shamblanderson
• shamblanderson.com
• Anderson on Longform
• Anderson’s New York TImes Magazine archive
• 03:00 "Kevin Durant and (Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team of All Time" (New York Times Magazine • June 2021)
• 05:00 "The Mind of John McPhee" (New York Times Magazine • Sept. 2017)
• 05:00 Draft No. 4 (John McPhee • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2017)
• 07:00 "The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami" (New York Times Magazine • Oct, 2011)
• 10:00 Boom Town (Crown • 2019)
• 19:00 "The Inscrutable Brilliance of Anne Carson" (New York Times Magazine • March 2013)
• 20:00 "David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue" (New York Times Magazine • Aug. 2016)
• 35:00 "The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic" (New York Times Magazine • April 2022)
• 35:00 "The Mad Liberationist" (New York • May 2010)
• 35:00 "Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans" (New York Times Magazine • Nov. 2021)
• 35:00 "The Uses of ‘Mythologies’" (Richard Brody • New Yorker • April 2012)

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