We've got something a little different today, the trailer for co-host Evan Ratliff's brand-new podcast Persona: The French Deception. It's the story of Gilbert Chikli, one of the greatest con artists of all time. Over eight episodes, Evan investigates how Chikli duped some of the world’s most powerful people into handing over their fortunes, evaded the law for years, and became a Robin Hood-like hero to many in the process. More than just a tale of criminal genius, Persona is about the moment we’re living in right now — the golden age of scammers — and the power of seduction. But what happens when the fantasy we’ve been lured into finally crumbles away?The first two episodes of Persona: The French Deception are available starting today wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Molly Lambert is a writer and host of the new podcast HeidiWorld: The Heidi Fleiss Story.“I think as a writer I always had this thing: I don't want to be out front. I don't want the spotlight on me. I'm not an actor. I want to be lurking in the back with the cast accepting the applause, but I don't want to be the center of attention. And so I think kind of like making peace with like, Look man, it's fine to be the center of attention when you made something you're proud of.”Show notes: @mollylambert  Lambert on Longform HeidiWorld: The Heidi Fleiss Story (iHeartPodcasts • 2022) 01:00 Deckheads: Chief Stews! (Anna Hossnieh and Molly Lambert) 07:00 O.J.: Made in America (Ezra Edelman • ESPN Films, Laylow Films • 2016) 10:00 Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon • Penguin Books • 2010) 10:00 Vineland (Thomas Pynchon • Penguin Classics • 1997) 11:00 You Must Remember This (Karina Longworth) 11:00 Once Upon a Time… In the Valley: T-R-A-C-I (Lili Anolik • C13Originals • 2020) 12:00 Short Cuts (Robert Altman • Fine Line Features • 1993) 16:00 "Young Playwrights Get Off-Bway Spotlight in Sondheim Founded Fest" (Playbill • Sep 2002) 21:00 Lolita Podcast (Jamie Loftus • iHeartRadio • 2021) 24:00 "Porntopia" (Grantland • Mar 2015) 24:00 Karina Longworth on Longform Podcast 32:00 "‘Mad Men’ Week 1: Catching Tigers in Red Weather" (Grantland • Apr 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sam Knight is a London-based staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold.“I had a kind of working definition of what a premonition was when I was writing this book, which is: It's not just a feeling. It's not just a hunch. It's just not like a sense in the air. It's like, you know. You know, and you don't even want to know because you can't know and no one's going to believe you that you know, but you know. And what are you going to do about it? It's a horrible feeling.”Show notes: @samknightwrites samknight.net Knight on Longform Knight's New Yorker archive Knight's Guardian archive 09:00 "Mixed up in Minsk" (Times of London • Mar 2007) 09:00 "Summer Celebrations in Mongolia" (Times of London • Dec 2007) 10:00 "Enter Left" (New Yorker • May 2016) 17:00 "Inside the Snow Globe" (Harper’s • Jul 2011) 21:00 "The Bouvier Affair" (New Yorker • Feb 2016) 21:00 "How Football Leaks is Exposing Corruption in European Soccer" New Yorker • Jun 2019) 21:00 "How the Sandwich Consumed Britain" (Guardian • Nov 2017) 21:00 "The Spectacular Power of Big Lens" (Guardian • May 2018) 27:00 "Sadiq Khan Takes on Brexit and Terror" (New Yorker • Jul 2017) 27:00 "The Empty Promise of Boris Johnson" (New Yorker • Jun 2019) 27:00 "Theresa May’s Impossible Choice" (New Yorker • Jul 2018) 27:00 "Nicola Sturgeon’s Quest for Scottish Independence" (New Yorker • May 2021) 28:00 "Operation London Bridge: The Secret Plans for the Days After the Queen's Death" (Guardian • Mar 2017) 30:00 "President Trump’s First Term" (Evan Osnos • New Yorker • Sep 2016) 30:00 "The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest" (Kathryn Schulz • New Yorker • Jul 2015) 34:00 The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold (Penguin • 2022) 45:00 "The Psychiatrist Who Believed People Could Tell the Future" (New Yorker • Mar 2019) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mitchell S. Jackson is a journalist and author. His profile of Ahmaud Arbery, ”Twelve Minutes and a Life,” won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.”What is 'great'? 'Great' isn’t really sales, right? No one cares what James Baldwin sold. So: Are you doing the important work?”Show notes: @MitchSJackson mitchellsjackson.com Jackson on Longform 00:00 "Twelve Minutes and a Life" (Runner’s World • Jun 2020) 01:00 Pafko at the Wall (Don DeLillo • Scribner • 2001) 03:00 "Ahmaud Arbery’s Final Minutes: What Videos and 911 Calls Show" (Malachy Browne, Drew Jordan, Dmitriy Khavin and Ainara Tiefenthaler • New York Times • May 2020) 12:00 "We Went to Vegas to Wring Joy From Heartbreak" (New York Times Magazine • Sep 2021) 16:00 Survival Math (Scribner • 2020) 24:00 The Residue Years (Bloomsbury • 2014) 29:00 "Chuck Palahniuk, Tom Spanbauer Share Writing Secrets" (Jeff Baker • Oregonian • May 2014) 34:00 "When Michael B. Jordan Promises to Come Home, He Means It" (Esquire • Nov 2019) 36:00 "Chris Rock's Plan for Immortality" (Esquire • May 2021) 44:00 "Prison" (Richard Just, Editor • Washington Post • Oct 2019) 44:00 "Calendars" (Washington Post • Oct 2019) 45:00 Olio (Tyehimba Jess • Wave Books • 2016) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joe Bernstein is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News.“The question of disinformation is almost an attempt to create a new mythology around why people act the way they do. I don’t mean to say that it’s some kind of nefarious plot. ... It’s a natural, or a convenient explanation. And that’s why I think it caught on for some time anyway.”Show notes: @Bernstein Bernstein on Longform 02:00 "Bad News: Selling the Story of Disinformation" (Harper's • Aug 2021) 12:00 "How Tucker Carlson Stoked White Fear to Conquer Cable" (Nicholas Confessore • New York Times • Apr 2022) 18:00 Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (Tim Hwang • FSG Originals • Oct 2020) 25:00 Charlie Warzel on Longform Podcast (Mar 2020) 26:00 "'Look At What We’re Doing With Your Money, You Dick': How Peter Thiel Backed An 'Anti-Woke' Film Festival" (BuzzFeed News • Mar 2022) 28:00 "The Curious Life and Mind-Altering Death of Justin Clark" (Christopher Robbins • New York Magazine • Feb 2022) 36:00 "'Corrosive Communities': How A Facebook Fight Over Wind Power Predicts the Future of Local Politics in America" (BuzzFeed News • Dec 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Vauhini Vara is a contributing writer at Wired and author of the novel The Immortal King Rao.“With a magazine story, it might be like six months or a year or two, if it's something that took you a long time. With this [novel], it was 13 years for me, but the sort of emotional arc felt similar, where there were these periods of despair and a sense that like, this wasn't going anywhere, and then these periods where like, I'm a genius and this is going to be the best book ever written. You go back and forth, as we do with our journalism. But then with every draft of it, I always felt like, all right, this is better than the last draft at least. I don't know what the next one is going to look like, but this is definitely an improvement. And I feel like that's what kept me feeling like I was at least moving in the right direction.”Show notes: @vauhinivara vauhinivara.com Vara on Longform 01:00 "Bee-Brained" (Harper's • May 2017) 11:00 "Special Counsel" (California Sunday • Jun 2015) 30:00 "New Workers of the World" (Bloomberg Businessweek • Jul 2017) 32:00 "Can This Startup Break Big Tech’s Hold on A.I.?" (Fortune • Jun 2018) 32:00 "Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise" (Wired • May 2022) 37:00 "Ghosts" (The Believer • Aug 2021) 37:00 "The Political Awakening of Silicon Valley" (California Sunday • Sep 2017) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter for the New York Times Magazine. She won the George Polk Award for uncovering intelligence failures and civilian deaths associated with U.S. air strikes.“I think what was really damning for me is that, when I obtained these 1,300 records, in not one of them was there a single instance in which they describe any disciplinary action for anyone involved, or any findings of wrongdoing. … When I was looking at this in totality, suddenly it’s really hard to say you have a system of accountability.”This is the last in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Daniel Chang covers health care for the Miami Herald. Along with Carol Marbin Miller, he won the George Polk Award for "Birth & Betrayal," a series co-published with ProPublica that exposed the consequences of a 1988 law designed to shelter medical providers from lawsuits by funding lifelong care for children severely disabled by birth-related brain injuries.“I think that someone on the healthcare beat looks for stories from the perspective of patients, people who want or need to access the healthcare system and for different reasons cannot. It’s a pretty complicated system and it’s difficult for most people to understand how their health insurance works — and that’s if they have health insurance. If they don’t, there is a whole other system they have to go through. What you look for is access issues and accountability for that.”This is the latest in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the director of the Global Migration Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She won the George Polk Award for "The Migrant Workers Who Follow Climate Disasters."“I’m all about the Venn diagram where the individual meaningful stories of things people are up against intersect with the big systemic injustice issues of our day. It feels like climate is clearly an enormous domain where it’s been hard in some ways to tell substantive stories of where actual human beings are navigating and pushing back on some of these huge cultural forces.”This is the third in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Maria Abi-Habib is the bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean for the New York Times. Along with her colleague Frances Robles, Abi-Habib won the George Polk Award for revealing concealed aspects of the murder of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse.“We’re not going to stop covering Haiti just because you don’t like us … at the end of the day you owe it to your citizens to talk to the media because if you can’t talk to the media and actually answer some questions, how are you going to run a country? We’re not doing this for ourselves, we’re doing this because we think that Haiti matters and we think Haitians, like all citizens in this world, actually deserve some answers to their questions and to know what the truth is.”This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices