Theo Baker is the investigations editor at The Stanford Daily. The first college student ever to win a George Polk Award, Baker received a special recognition for uncovering allegations that pioneering research co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist, was supported in part by manipulated imagery.

“It’s useful to intellectualize it because when you actually get going, this is something that keeps me up at night. … It’s the last thing I think about when I go to sleep, and the first thing on my mind when I wake up.”

This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

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David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

“I became very haunted by the stories that [nations] don't tell. Nations and empires preserve their powers not only by the stories they tell, but also by the stories they leave out. … Early in my career, if I came across the silences in a story, I might not have highlighted them, because I thought, Well, there's nothing to tell there. And now I try to let the silences speak.”

Show notes:

• @DavidGrann
• davidgrann.com
• Grann on Longform
• Grann on Longform Podcast #3
• Grann on Longform Podcast #241
• Grann on Longform Podcast #329
• Grann's New Yorker archive
• 01:00 The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday • 2023)
• 02:00 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday • 2017)
• 28:00 The White Darkness (Doubleday • 2018)
• 61:00 Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese • Appian Way, Apple Studios • 2023)

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Vann Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of Floodlines: The Story of an Unnatural Disaster. His new podcast is Holy Week: The Story of a Revolution Undone.

“I’m often toggling between environmental justice, between the history of race and racial organization in America. And to me, they’re all one story, and I’m trying to tell the story about how the conditions of marginalization in America have made and shaped the present. That’s it. That’s one story.”

Show notes:

• Newkirk II on Longform
• Newkirk II’s Atlantic archive
• 04:00 Floodlines (The Atlantic • 2020)
• 08:00 “The New Coretta Scott King: Emerging From the Legacy” (Jaqueline Trescott • The Washington Post • Jan 1978)
• 17:00 “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” transcript (Martin Luther King Jr. • April 1968)
• 42:00 “The Battle for North Carolina” (The Atlantic • Oct 2016)
• 43:00 “Puerto Rico’s Environmental Catastrophe” (The Atlantic • Oct 2017)
• 53:00 “The Case for a Voting-Rights Amendment” (The Atlantic • Feb 2021)
• 53:00 “The Great Land Robbery” (The Atlantic • Sept 2019)
• 53:00 “Texas Voter-Fraud Claims Don’t Have to Be True to Achieve Their Goal” (The Atlantic • Feb 2019)

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Liz Hoffman, a former The Wall Street Journal reporter, is now the business and finance editor for Semafor. Her new book is Crash Landing: The Inside Story of How the World's Biggest Companies Survived an Economy on the Brink.

“I think these systems are hugely important and are wielded by people who are not that accessible. If you can sort of open the aperture a little bit and unpack that and explain to people what’s going on and leave them to sort of, you know, come away with their own conclusions about the morality of the whole thing — that's where I’m most comfortable.”

Show notes:

• @lizrhoffman
• Hoffman’s Semafor archive
• Hoffman’s Wall Street Journal archive
• 30:00 Ben Smith on Longform Podcast
• 37:00 "Microsoft eyes $10 billion bet on ChatGPT" (Hoffman and Reed Albergotti • Semafor • Jan 2023)

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Roxanna Asgarian is the law and courts reporter for the Texas Tribune. Her new book is We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.

“Every once in a while, I'll have someone just freak out at me. And it keeps you honest, in a way, because they don't owe you anything. People don't owe you anything as a journalist.… But everyone reacts to trauma differently and some people really do want to talk about it. And I think the families in this book really wanted to talk about it and it felt like no one was even paying attention to them.”

Show notes:

• @strawburriez
• Asgarian's Texas Tribune archive
• We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2023)
• 12:00 "Child in viral Portland police hug photo missing, 5 family members dead after California cliff crash" (Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Mar 2018)
• 12:00 "Devonte Hart family crash: Sarah Hart sent alarming 3 a.m. text to friend ... then silence" (Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
• 13:00 "Devonte Hart family crash: 'It's just devastating,' says aunt who fought for custody" (Roxanna Asgarian and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh • The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
• 34:00 "Devonte Hart's biological mom: They gave my kids 'to monsters'" (The Oregonian • Apr 2018)
• 45:00 "Before Children’s Grisly Deaths, A Family Fought for Them and Lost" (The Appeal • Jul 2018)
• 45:00 "A Mother Grapples with an Adoption that Led to Deaths" (The Appeal • Feb 2019)
• 45:00 "His siblings were killed by their adoptive mother. He was left in foster care to suffer a more common fate." (Washington Post • Dec 2019)
• 46:00 Broken Harts (Glamour and HowStuffWorks • 2018)

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Mary Childs is a co-host of the podcast Planet Money and the author of The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All.

“I love aberrations. I love when things go wrong. You get a high stress situation, you get all of the manifestations of personality. We're our most selves, if not our best selves, at those times. I like the [stories] that have embedded in them all of those conduits of power and that reveal the greater system.”

Show notes:

• @mdc
• marychilds.com
• Planet Money (NPR)
• The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All (Flatiron • 2022)
• 26:00 American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped the Nation (Sarah L. Quinn • Princeton University Press • 2019)
• 33:00 The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis • Norton • 2010)
• 33:00 The Bond King: Investment Secrets from PIMCO's Bill Gross (Tim Middleton • Wiley • 2004)
• 43:00 "J. Screwed" (Planet Money • NPR • May 2020)
• 43:00 "Banque Worms" (Planet Money • NPR • Jul 2021)

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Laurel Braitman is a science writer, the author of Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds, and the founder of Writing Medicine. Her new book is What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love.

“My life was becoming unmanageable, in a way. I was using success in many ways like a drug, and I’d say like an analgesic on the sorts of difficult feelings I hadn’t wanted to face truly since childhood. And we are rewarded in this culture for these kinds of outward forms of success that often have nothing to do with what’s going on inside of you.”

Show notes:

• @LaurelBraitman
• laurelbraitman.com
• 01:00 Pop-Up Magazine
• 01:00 Animal Madness (Simon & Schuester • 2015)
• 05:00 “The Strange Tale of Echo, the Parrot Who Saw Too Much” (Atlas Obscura • March 2016)
• 07:00 Braitman’sTED archive
• 11:00 “Birds & Bees” (Ira Glass • This American Life • May 2015)
• 32:00 “Duck Syndrome” (Arifeen Rahman • KQED • July 2019)
• 40:00 Dear Sugar archive

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Sam Fragoso is a writer, filmmaker, and the host of the podcast Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso.

“We have an hour together. We may not have another. We're here for a brief moment and then, you know, we die. And I want this thing to be as good as it can be. If if it's anything less than that, I'm just not interested. … And that, to me, is why you keep doing it: because that feeling when you really feel like you've put someone's life on the record in a way that is beautiful and painful and idiosyncratic and triumphant … when it goes well, it's like I lost 20 pounds. I am never a nicer or happier person than immediately after a taping. I'm kind of goofy and silly and delirious and grateful to be doing this. Like, so fucking grateful.”

Show notes:

• @SamFragoso
• samfragoso.com
• 00:00 Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso
• 08:00 "#1: Matthieu Aikins" (Longform Podcast • Aug 2012)
• 09:00 "#156: Renata Adler" (Longform Podcast • Sep 2015)
• 09:00 "#187: Elizabeth Gilbert" (Longform Podcast • Apr 2016)
• 16:00 "Dr. Ashish Jha" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Mar 2020)
• 17:00 "Noam Chomsky" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Apr 2020)
• 21:00 "Margaret Atwood" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Mar 2022)
• 21:00 "David Byrne" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Mar 2022)
• 21:00 "Questlove" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Feb 2022)
• 22:00 "Anna Sale" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Apr 2017)
• 27:00 "David Sedaris" (Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso • Jun 2022)
• 52:00 WTF with Marc Maron
• 54:00 "Live Taping: Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso" (On Air Fest • Feb 2023)

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Eric Lach is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers New York. His latest article is “The Mayor and the Con Man.”

“I think about my own trajectory, my little generation of journalists—it was easier to get jobs reporting on national politics than to get a job reporting on something that you could see and go to and that is a really strange thing, the relief and the joy that I feel like when I can just take the subway twenty minutes to go see something interesting for a story or talk to somebody interesting or explore physically and not just feel like I’m making phone calls and Googling. It’s a very different kind of work, but it’s just not something that was super available.”

Show notes:

• @Eric Lach
• Lach on Longform
• Lach’s New Yorker archive
• 08:00 "Eric Adams Says He Has Swagger. What Else Does He Have?" (New Yorker • Jan 2022)
• 12:00 "What is Eric Adams’s Plan for the Riker Island Crisis?" (New Yorker • Jan 2022)
• 13:00 "Eric Adams Wants to Compstat New York City" (New Yorker • May 2021)
• 15:00 adams-donors-sliwa.html">“Eric Adams Rakes in $7.7 Million, With Help From Wealthy Donors” (Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Dana Rubinstein • New York Times • Oct 2021)
• 24:00 "Why Do So Many New York Politicians Want Paperboy Prince to Hit Them in the Face with a Pie?" (New Yorker • June 2021)
• 26:00 "“Pretty Much a Big Mess”: One Iowa Caucus Precinct’s Drama-Filled Night" (New Yorker • Feb 2020)

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Willa Paskin, a former TV critic, is the host of the podcast Decoder Ring.

“I want it to feel like a trap door. When you push on a trap door, there’s like a little spring. If it’s the right idea, you start to look into it, and you’re like, Oh, it’s giving a little.”

Show notes:

• @willapaskin
• 00:00 Paskin's Slate archive
• 00:00 Paskin's Salon archive
• 00:00 Paskin's Vulture archive
• 00:00 Decoder Ring (Slate)
• 00:00 "The Invention of Hydration" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Apr 2021)
• 00:00 "Cellino & Barnes, Injury Attorneys, 800-888-8888 " (Decoder Ring • Slate • Dec 2022)
• 01:00 "The Sideways Effect" (Decoder Ring • Slate • May 2022)
• 03:00 slate-television-critic-willa-paskin-became-a-tv-critic.html">"Why I Became a TV Critic" (Slate • Jan 2016)
• 38:00 ring-explores-the-history-and-meaning-of-the-laugh-track.html">"The Laff Box" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Apr 2018)
• 38:00 "The Blue Steak Experiment" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Dec 2020)
• 40:00 ring-explores-the-war-between-chuck-e-cheeses-and-showbiz-pizza-place-and-the-fate-of-their-animatronic-characters-including-the-king.html">"Chuck E. Cheese Pizza War" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Jun 2019)
• 40:00 "The Cabbage Patch Kids Riots" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Nov 2020)
• 42:00 "Selling Out" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Aug 2021)
• 42:00 "The Sign Painter" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Jun 2021)
• 53:00 "The Butt and the Bustle" (Decoder Ring • Slate • Nov 2022)

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