Twelve years ago, three friends obsessive about longform narrative non-fiction decided to start a podcast. Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky and Evan Ratliff were all writers and editors in their 30s living in New York City when they started Longform, the series dedicated to understanding how their favourite magazine articles took shape. They started off interviewing people they knew, writers such as the Atlantic correspondent and novelist Ta-Nehisi Coates and the investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, and on their website, they recommended the best nonfiction pieces published each day. Soon they had to stop sharing a microphone and move into a real studio: everyone wanted to be on their show. They’ve interviewed Terry Gross, Jon Ronson, Ezra Klein, Lena Dunham, Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, Michael Pollan and hundreds of others. Sometimes they spoke about a writer’s whole overture, their careers and routines, other times they went into granular detail about a single article, exactly how the reporting took shape, where the idea was born, what it took to get it published.
Now, more than a decade later, the series is coming to an end. In their 585th and final episode, released on 26 June, Linsky interviews the essayist and New York Times contributing writer John Jeremiah Sullivan (a guest so long awaited that one listener wrote in offering to donate a liver if he appeared on the show). Although these conversations can become technical, they are never just about the practice of writing: the more interesting question is why someone chooses to write. Sullivan credits Spinoza, atheism, his own “relentless memory”, shame and masochism with his own desire to write. He says he loves writing in an “animal, childlike way”. That kind of love echoes with the enthusiastic curiosity Lammer, Linksy and Ratliff have held for their guests over the years. Certain episodes contained unforgettable revelations – Pulitzer Prize-winner Rachel Kaadzi Ghanesh’s description of speaking with the father of the mass-murderer Dylan Roof, the novelist and essayist George Saunders’s startling vulnerability, the war photographer Lynsey Addario recounting the moment she was kidnapped.
Does the end of the show signal the collapse of longform journalism more broadly? Sullivan and Linksy laugh at the “vanishingly small audience” for the kind of writing they discuss. They’re not wrong – the average visitor to any news website spends less than two minutes reading and magazine circulation is down 15%. But the hosts end on a positive note, after so many interviews they know longform writers and essayists are irrepressible, even in suffocated industry conditions. Lammer, Linsky and Ratliff have proven this themselves, continuing the podcast as a side project alongside years of other work: over the past twelve years, they have written books, founded companies and started families. As Ratcliff puts it, he has “zero faith in the institutions to solve problems, but partly because of the show I have an incredible faith in people to find ways to do the work.” Linsky looks forward to what will come in their place: “I’m very hopeful that someone I do not know will start podcasts that I really want to listen to.”
[See also: How to write for radio]
Content from our partners
Related
