Rosecrans Baldwin is a writer and regular contributor to GQ. His latest novel is The Last Kid Left. “It requires a lot of preparation in order to just have lunch with Roger Federer. Being a person who tends toward anxiety and also a former Boy Scout—put those two things together and I will exhaustively prepare so that I can come across like a complete idiot. The idea of sitting down with someone like that is that you should know everything about their life and their career so that you can go in with 12 questions in the back of your mind.” Thanks to MailChimp, Breach, CoinTalk, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2019) @rosecrans Baldwin on Longform rosecransbaldwin.com [1:15]The Morning News [1:50] "My Life Cleanse: One Month Inside L.A.'s Cult of Betterness" (GQ • Nov 2018) [9:15] "The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High" (Jay Caspian Kang • The Morning News • Oct 2010) [11:40] All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel (Anthony Doerr • Scribner • 2017) [12:15] "A Year of Kibble-and-Playdates Calculus" (New York • Oct 2007) [12:45] Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down (Picador • 2013) [13:00] Baldwin's archive at GQ [13:05] "Am I Too Old to Win the U.S. Open?" (GQ • Sep 2014) [13:45] "Will Roger Federer Ever Be Done?" (GQ • Mar 2017) [18:35] "Welcome to Camp Midlife Crisis!" (GQ • Aug 2016) [22:40] "Learn to Kill in Seven Days or Less" (GQ • Mar 2014) [33:50] Cults in Our Midst: The Continuing Fight Against Their Hidden Menace (Margaret Thaler Singer • Jossey-Bass • 2003) [34:20] "I Cried Enough to Fill a Glass" (Mark Fisher • Washington Post • Oct 1987) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2019) @cragcrest Aschwanden's personal site [3:40] Aschwanden's archive at 538 [3:45] Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery (W. W. Norton & Company • 2019) [5:20] Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel (Taffy Brodesser-Akner • Random House • 2019) [13:35] Courage Camp: A Master Class on the Business of Freelancing [17:35] Aschwanden's freelancing archive [25:40] "The Change in Mammogram Guidelines" (LA Times • Mar 2011) [25:45] "Cancer Screening Can Do More Harm Than Good" (Popular Science • Jul 2014) [28:25] "Believe Tyler?" (Bicycling • Nov 2007) [pdf] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lydia Polgreen, former foreign correspondent and director of NYT Global at The New York Times, is the editor in chief of HuffPost. “Like a lot of people, I think I went a little bit crazy after Donald Trump got elected. ... If Hillary Clinton had won the election, I have a feeling that I would still be a mid-level manager at The New York Times. But after the election, I really started to think about journalism, about my role in it, about who journalism was serving and who it was for, and I just became really enamored with this idea that you could create a news organization that was less about people who are left out of the political and economic power equations, but actually for them.” Thanks to MailChimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. @lpolgreen Polgreen on Longform [1:00] "Layoffs Underway at HuffPost a Day After Parent Company Verizon Announced Cuts" (Tom Kludt • CNN • Jan 2019) [7:45] Polgreen's New York Times archive [8:30] Marty Baron on Twitter [13:30] Roseveill Area Middle School [23:15] Washington Monthly [27:00] "Correcting the Record Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception" (New York Times • May 2003) [28:30] "A Racial Acceptance That Resonates" (New York Times • Dec 2013) [29:00] "200 Years After Napoleon, Haiti Finds Little to Celebrate" (New York Times • Jan 2004) [33:30] "Covering Sudan and Darfur's Plight" (NPR • May 2006) [35:30] "Money and Violence Hobble Democracy in Nigeria" (New York Times • Nov 2006) [45:30] "Lydia Polgreen on Leaving to Lead Huffington Post: ‘Hardest Decision I’ve Ever Made’" (New York Times • Dec 2016) [53:00] "Layoffs Hit HuffPost After $4.6 Billion Verizon Media Write-Down" (Andy Campbell • HuffPost • Jan 2019) [55:30] "Mic Shuts Down, a Victim of Management Hubris and Facebook’s Pivot to Video" (Mathew Ingram • CJR • Dec 2018) [56:00] "Founder’s Big Idea to Revive BuzzFeed’s Fortunes? A Merger With Rivals" (Edmund Lee • New York Times • Nov 2018) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thomas Morton is a writer and former correspondent for HBO's _Vice News_. He was at Vice from 2004-2019 and is a major character in Jill Abramson's _Merchants of Truth_. “You have to go with your gut and I feel like that’s one of the most essential qualities in doing anything of the nature of what we did. Of making documentaries or reporting news or current events, you really have to have a good sense of intuition for who you’re dealing with, what they’re telling you, what you’re telling them, how you’re behaving. It’s all human interaction, you can’t govern that with hard and fast rules or with extremely set rules. Beyond the extreme ones there are always going to be murky areas. You have to be willing to accept that and work with those.” Thanks to MailChimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Random House • Jan 2019) The Longform Podcast Live: The Mastermind book release party with special guests @Babyballs69 Morton on Longform "Oh, This Is Great" (Vice • Jan 2008) "In the Land of the Juggalos—A Juggalo Is King" (Vice • Sep 2007) [0:50] "News to Me" (Medium • Jan 2019) [1:00] The Merchants of Truth (Jill Abramson • Simon & Schuster • 2019) [20:45] Morton's archive at Vice [23:50] "I Joined Three Cults Simultaneously" (Vice • Sep 2006) [24:45] Aum Shinrikyo Wikipedia page [35:30] "Tobaccoland" (Vice • May 2013) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David Grann is a staff writer for the New Yorker. His new book is The White Darkness. “I do think in life, and in reporting, that reckoning with failure is a part of the process. And reckoning with your own limitations. I think that’s probably the arc and change I have made as I get older. Just as O’Shea doesn’t get the squid, failure is such an integral part of life and what you make of it. Too often we’re always focused on the success side, and I don’t always think the successes teach us as much as the journey and having things elude us. ... I'm being completely honest, I look at every story I've ever written as a failure. Because I always have some model, some perfect ideal, that I want to try to reach.” Thanks to MailChimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Random House • Jan 2019) The Longform Podcast Live: The Mastermind book release party with special guests @DavidGrann Grann on Longform Longform Podcast #3: David Grann Longform Podcast #241: David Grann [1:50] The White Darkness (Doubleday • 2018) [1:55] "The White Darkness" (New Yorker • Feb 2018) [4:10] "The Squid Hunter" (New Yorker • May 2004) [11:40] Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday • 2017) [13:35] "The Lost City of Z" (New Yorker • Sep 2005) [13:40] The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (Vintage • 2010) [14:45] "The Hero Myth" (New Republic • May 1999) [22:30] "The Yankee Comandante" (New Yorker • May 2012) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tommy Tomlinson, a former newspaper columnist, is the host of Southbound podcast. His new book is The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America. “The thing that galvanized me was the death of my sister. I signed the contract November 2014, she died Christmas Eve of that year. She had been overweight just like me. She was older than me and died from complications, an infection that was directly connected to her weight. And that more than anything made me think if I don’t deal with this now, I’m not going to be around in 10 years to write this book. So, the book helped certainly. The idea that I was going to put this stuff on paper and expose myself in this way to the world and I didn’t want to be a failure at the end of it. More than that, I didn’t want to be a failure because I didn’t want to be a failure. I don’t want to die.” Thanks to MailChimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Random House • Jan 2019) The Longform Podcast Live: The Mastermind book release party with special guests @tommytomlinson Tomlinson on Longform tommytomlinson.com [1:55] "You Can't Quit Cold Turkey" (ESPN Magazine • Aug 2014) [2:10] The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man's Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America (Simon & Schuster • 2019) [2:25] "The Weight I Carry" (The Atlantic • Jan 2019) [14:45] Longform podcast #317: Paige Williams [18:25] "The Hunley 8, The Charleston 9" (Charlotte Observer • Apr 2004) [22:20] "Something Went Very Wrong at Toomer's Corner" (Sports Illustrated • Aug 2011) [31:55] Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Roxane Gay • Harper • 2017) [36:20] Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout • Random House • 2008) [48:20] Southbound podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Julie Snyder, one of the first producers at This American Life, is the co-creator of Serial and S-Town. Serial Season 3 is out now. “I am constantly second-guessing myself. I am full of regret and recrimination all the time. I don’t pride myself on it cause it probably goes too far, but in other ways I do feel like I am a person who is very flawed and I make mistakes and I try and learn from them. And I try to be very open to other people’s thoughts and input and everything like that. So to be that open to criticism after season one [of Serial] was rough for being that open because we just got so much attention. I could feel people being like, ‘Oh, go cry on your bags of money.’ It was huge. I got that, but at the same time, it was hard to ignore.” Thanks to MailChimp, First Day Back, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. The Longform Podcast Live: The Mastermind book release party with special guests Serial S-Town Longform Podcast #159: Ira Glass Longform Podcast #239: Brian Reed Longform Podcast #273: Zoe Chace [7:20] Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse (Steve Bogira • Vintage • 2006) [58:50] Snyder on This American Life [59:05] "Throwing the First Punch" (This American Life • Mar 1998) [1:11:45] "Ira Glass's Commencement Speech at the Columbia Journalism School Graduation" (Ira Glass • This American Life • May 2018) [1:18:10] "Harper High School—Part One" (This American Life • Feb 2013) [1:18:15] "Harper High School—Part Two" (This American Life • Feb 2013) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Doug Bock Clark has written for GQ, Wired, and The New Yorker. His new book is The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life. “I think for me the answer has always been you just find the people. You just listen to their stories. I think we're all microcosms, right? We're all fractals of the bigger world. Whether it's my own life or your life or the Lamalerans or other people I've encountered reporting. I think one of the things I'm constantly aware of is how these sort of greater world historical forces are working on us and shaping our lives. For more people than most people would assume, if you just followed their life and looked at it in the particulars but also in the broader circumstances, you could probably draw larger themes from them and their experiences. I never had any worries about whether I could expand the Lamaleran story. It was always just about getting those specific stories right, and I knew the rest of it would come.” Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. The Longform Podcast Live: The Mastermind book release party with special guests @DougBockClark Clark on Longform [1:10] "The Untold Story of Otto Warmbier, American Hostage" (GQ • Jul 2018) [1:20] "The Untold Story of Kim Jong-nam’s Assassination" (GQ • Sep 2018) [2:10] The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific with a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life (Little, Brown and Company • 2019) [2:10] "The Whalers' Odyssey" (The Atavist Magazine • Nov 2018) [2:20] The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. (Evan Ratliff • Random House • 2019) [8:00] Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Katherine Boo • Random House • 2014) [16:40] "The Second Tsunami" (Glimpse • Oct 2011) [22:20] "The Bot Bubble: How click farms have inflated social media currency" (The New Republic • Apr 2015) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lizzie Johnson covers wildfires for the San Francisco Chronicle. “It’s kind of like when you’re a beginning journalist and you have to write an obituary—calling the family of the person who died seems like this insurmountable, very invasive task and you really don’t want to do it. That’s kind of how I felt about interviewing fire victims at first. I felt like I was somehow intruding on their grief and their pain. But somewhere along the way I realized there’s healing power in talking about what you’ve been through. Saying it out loud and being able to claim ownership to it. I found that time after time these people are very grateful because they need to talk. They have something to say in the aftermath of this big, massive thing that just came and wiped out everything they knew. They really do just need someone to listen to them. I have never had someone tell me, ‘Go away, we don’t want to talk to you.’ And I’m completely bowled over by that every single time.” Thanks to MailChimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. @lizziejohnsonnn Johnson on Longform Johnson's archive at San Francisco Chronicle [0:40] "A Fire, a Newborn Baby and a Pact: Tales of Survival From Paradise" (San Francisco Chronicle • Nov 2018) [3:20] "For Survivors of the Tubbs Fire, a New, Unhappy Normal" (San Francisco Chronicle • Oct 2018) [4:05] "After Deadly Carr Fire, a Question of How—and Whether—to Rebuild 1,000 Homes" (San Francisco Chronicle • Aug 2018) [17:45] Noah Berger Photography [23:40] "After Wine Country Fires, Victims Confront Emotional Ruins: ‘We Have a Long Way to Go’" (San Francisco Chronicle • Dec 2017) [29:45] "150 Minutes of Hell" (San Francisco Chronicle • Dec 2018) [39:20] "Ed Bledsoe Couldn’t Outrace the Carr Fire to Save His Family. But in His Heart, They’re Alive" (San Francisco Chronicle • Aug 2018) [41:05] "Signs of Life Amid Scars and Loss" (San Francisco Chronicle • Apr 2018) [42:50] "Regret Haunts Wine Country Fire Hero: ‘I’ve Never Cried This Much’" (San Francisco Chronicle • Jul 2018) [55:10] The Centerpiece [55:15] "City of Ash"(The Centerpiece • Oct 2018) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Malcolm Gladwell is a New Yorker staff writer, the author The Tipping Point and Blink, and the host of Revisionist History. His new podcast is Broken Record. “The loveliest thing is to interview someone who’s never been interviewed before. To sort of watch them in a totally novel experience. Particularly when you’re interviewing them about things they never thought were worthy of an interview. That’s a really lovely experience. It’s like watching a kid on a roller coaster for the first time. But a celebrity is a very different kind of experience. The bar for them is quite high. They’ve been interviewed a million times, so you have to be on your game. You have to take them somewhere that’s a little unfamiliar to get them to perk up. Otherwise it’s just another of a long line of interviews. It’s a lot more demanding.” Thanks to MailChimp, Aspen Ideas To Go, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode. @Gladwell Gladwell on Longform [0:30] Gladwell on Episode 62 of the Longform Podcast [0:35] Gladwell on Episode 204 of the Longform Podcast [0:40] Revisionist History [0:45] Broken Record [2:20] David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (Little, Brown and Company • 2013) [2:30] Panoply [10:45] It's a Long Story: My Life (Willie Nelson • Little, Brown and Company • 2015) [28:00] Gladwell's archive at The New Yorker [28:50] Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown and Company • 2005) [30:20] Revisionist History: Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis [30:45] Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments (Gina Perry • The New Press • 2013) [38:20] Revisionist History: Free Brian Williams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices