It had been 14 years since Joi Lee lived full time in the United States. Though she grew up in the U.S., the journalist and documentarian has lived all over the globe. She was based in Doha, Qatar while working for outlets including Al Jazeera, followed by a stint in Seoul, and later in London as head of editorial for Earthrise Studio. She has always covered the big stories, from “the refugee crisis to just generally stories of how different communities around the world are impacted by various forces like economic or food insecurity,” says Lee.

While in London, Lee focused on connecting climate issues to human stories. But when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents went into Minneapolis, Lee knew it was time to return stateside.

Lee’s portfolio of work spans several mediums, including documentaries, 360 video, photography, and podcasting. But her recent work in Minneapolis inspired her to go back to an older form of journalism: writing and reporting.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Lee talks about her past work and what it meant to return to the U.S. to report on the Trump administration’s shift to more aggressive immigration enforcement. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Jenna Schnuer

You’ve covered stories all over the globe. Why did you decide to return to the U.S.?

I was living in New York when Trump got elected the first time, and I covered his election, his inauguration, and then soon afterwards, I took a job at Al Jazeera in Doha. This time around, when I was watching news from abroad, I had this feeling in my stomach of, “Oh, my god. If my job is to be part of this industry that is meant to document and to act as witnesses, then what is my responsibility as an American?”

I’m not a person who’s ever had a sense of patriotism. [To be] totally honest, I’ve been deeply critical of a lot of … the American project, seeing how things are so quickly sliding, and seeing also the fear that I had, or that fear of my friends and colleagues or journalists in the U.S. who don’t have American passports. This is a time when I feel like it is important to exercise this American privilege and this American passport.

What was your plan for covering what’s happening in the U.S.?

I didn’t have a plan for it. I didn’t have any idea what was going to happen. I just wanted to be here to see if I could be of use in any way. I was in Minneapolis for New Year’s Eve and then I left, and like, two days later, Renée Good was killed. I just knew in my gut that this was a huge and pivotal moment in time. And it took me about a week before I decided, “Okay, you know what, I’m going to come back out here.”

The first few days were really intense, pitching furiously, but also trying to get my lay of the land, making connections, making relationships. I was going to a lot of mutual aid groups and a lot of cafes, and just sitting and striking up conversations and slowly building networks and relationships on the story front. Then in terms of the pitching, I used to work at Al Jazeera so I was speaking to a lot of people there. As I started to uncover more stories and to kind of build those relationships, it was about pairing them with the right publishers.

I’d been publishing on social media in terms of the daily kind of stuff that I was on the ground, and I wasn’t waiting for publishers for that because I wanted to be really responsive and quick in the way that I was covering things. But then on the back burner I was also doing slower forms of storytelling. Social media is like digital fast food, but my heart is in more sustainable slower forms of storytelling. So I worked on a few short videos for AJ+, which is following an Ecuadorian family that has been deeply impacted by the ICE raids here in Minneapolis, and they’ve been sheltering in place.

And then the other thing I’m working on is a larger, 25-minute documentary following a Native American lawyer here, who is actually from South Dakota, [but came to Minneapolis] once he heard that ICE was also targeting Native Americans and the layers of irony there. So I’ve been following his story and what it looks like from the Native American resistance front, which has been integral to the community here in Minneapolis in organizing and providing mutual aid against Operation Metro Surge.

“Less lethal” means “still deadly”

For decades, police have championed less-lethal munitions as life-saving alternatives to deadly force. Their history, however, tells a different story — one of imprecise science, unmeasured usage, untrained police forces, death, and disfigurement.

With revelatory reporting by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, stunning original and historical photography, and a captivating multimedia design, The People vs. Rubber Bullets tells the full, brutal story of kinetic impact projectiles and their usage, from rubber bullets’ invention in 1970s Northern Ireland all the way through the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

This award-winning, six-part, longform feature examines law enforcement’s use of these weapons in crowd control, chronicling a number of less-lethal victims and their struggle for justice. Read the stories of those whose lives were irrevocably changed.

You do not apologize for, at times, having a strong point of view in your work. You don’t “both sides” things. Why is that your approach?

I constantly have this conversation with other journalists. Because, as you know, it is a very existential question: How much do you bring [your] personal viewpoint into things, and what is objectiveness? What is neutral in the profession that we do? There’s always a viewpoint that exists in our work, whether or not we acknowledge it.

I think of journalism as very much an act of public service. You can describe that as the service of the pursuit of truth, or the service of helping communities make better informed decisions about what they need and what they want. That is the kind of journalism I want to do. There’s a very clear aim with that journalism, which is this act of public service.

I don’t want to be hiding that behind something, because I also want people to have an idea of what’s informing the way that I see the world and how I’m contributing to this dialog of whatever. And that’s not for everyone. I just don’t want to pretend like that isn’t informing the way that I shape or tell stories.

You work across a lot of platforms. How do you choose the media you’re going to use to report out a story?

It’s changed throughout time. For example, [my reporting over] the last four years has been very heavily on social media to communicate complex stories through digital media. Very short form, because we were targeting young people who were what we called “climate curious.” You know, it’s like understanding who your audience is, what you know, who you’re trying to speak to, and what language, what visual or storytelling language do they understand best? But yes, it’s definitely also just a balance of understanding what is the best medium to tell the right story.

What I’m writing on Instagram is this kind of strange mix between where the professional and the personal boundaries lie. But then I also do other kinds of documentaries and video reporting, which occupy a very different space where there’s a lot of time to sink into the nuance of things.

I have very strong political opinions and views, but at the same time, in terms of professional personal integrity, it’s really important for me to give space to the kind of gray zones in between, because that’s where the meat of human existence lies. Most of us actually live in this gray space, but that’s not necessarily the stuff that is easy to portray on social media.

Using all of those platforms requires a wide range of skills. How have you learned to put all of those media to work for your reporting?

I like to understand how things work from a big picture perspective, and be able to know enough to work within several different types of parameters. But I also think this is, in many ways, the nature of the kind of digital media landscape of journalism today. You need to be adept at several types of visual languages in order to be able to survive how quickly things evolve in today’s digital landscape.

That, being said, I definitely was, from the very beginning, more in that digital landscape. I have the deepest respect for people who have that kind of connection to a singular craft or technical craft. For me, it’s just been a mix of personality, being very hungry to explore different mediums, and to experiment. But also my career has always necessitated that you kind of have to know a bit of everything.

Since returning to the U.S. and, specifically, reporting from Minneapolis, you’ve added more written pieces to your reporting mix. But the writing feels more personal, more vulnerable. Can you talk about that?

I have always written but not necessarily in the sense of using my voice in an article format. I know the people at Shado Magazine, and I think they do really incredible work. I wanted to write for them because I love the angles and perspectives that they take with political issues. They’re based in the U.K. and I was interested in trying to reach different audiences who might not have a personal connection.

They want more of a personal voice, and so I found myself adapting a bit to that. It’s not natural to me to bring my own personal voice necessarily into things. And I’ve actually been very intentional over this last month in Minneapolis to have a sense of, like, “Yes, this is the person who’s doing the reporting, so you have an idea of where this is coming from.” And to me, that’s an important part of the accountability and transparency process.

But I’m also very cautious and trying to not center myself too much in storytelling. I personally grapple with this kind of influencer model that has come out in the media landscape. So for me, I’m trying to bring in my personal voice when it is useful as a bridge, but I don’t want to make that [my] default form of communication.

How are you doing after spending so much time covering ICE in Minnesota? This is all a lot to witness and report on.

I think this place is experiencing a lot of collective trauma. Everyone who’s been here the past month or two months, we’re all grappling with various levels of intensity. I was spending a lot of time with a journalist who has covered so many different war zones around the world. That’s what his experience has been for the last 20 years. And we were discussing why Minneapolis hits just a bit differently. I think it is the expectation that you have of what it’s meant to be in the U.S., where freedom of speech is such a bastion of American democracy and all the fluffy language we like to use that is deeply embedded in our mythology of the U.S.

But we never expected to see this American Midwest city to suddenly have these images of violence transposed on it. You’re in the mix of that, and so many bodies are being violated, being assaulted, being murdered. It’s been really, really intense.

I think now that we're coming off the tail end of that, a lot of people are in this process of trying to process this. You know, the images of seeing your neighbors abducted, people dragged screaming from their cars. The day of Alex Pretti's murder, so many of us were on that scene and being shot at with non-lethal munitions. I'm doing okay, but I just know that there's going to be a lot of scars here that people have to heal from and tend with. And you know, this is also building off of George Floyd five years ago too, where that trauma is still present.

Further reading from Joi Lee:

• Joi Lee’s Instagram account (ongoing)

• Deciphering South Korea (TVF, 2021)

• “Guilt Trip” (The Guardian, July 10, 2025)

• “No one is illegal on stolen land” (Shado, Feb. 5, 2026)

• “An occupation doesn’t end just because they say it does” (Shado, Feb. 17, 2026)

Jasper Craven’s journalism beat, which he describes in driest of verbiage as “veterans’ issues in the age of forever wars,” has evolved over recent years from the fringe of U.S. politics to the central animating threat of American culture. That’s due, he says, to a sprawling crisis in masculinity that’s fueling an interconnected toxic stew of misogyny, internet culture, gambling, and violence. Pair that with the endless pictures coming from the front lines of the Global War on Terror, which depict heavily-armed, camouflaged government forces in the center of major American cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, and it feels as though that evolution was inevitable.

His new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, publishing in May, builds on his past reporting for Mother Jones where he covered scandals at the elite Pennsylvania Valley Forge Military Academy to examine the full sweep of how America trains and shapes its warriors in a moment of great transition. Following in the writing tradition set by Sebastian Junger’s Tribe and Chris Hedges’ War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, Craven’s book is less about war itself and more about why and how men — and they’re still usually men — fight. He also explores the modern culture of war fighting and how the “forever wars” overseas have influenced an increasingly volatile strain of American masculinity here at home.

Craven has carved out a niche as a freelance reporter covering the military and veterans’ issues, writing over the years for WIRED, Harper’s, POLITICO, The Intercept, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times, among others, and he was one of the lead reporters on Long Lead’s own award-winning 2024 work about the crisis of veterans’ health care and housing in the United States, Home of the Brave.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Craven discusses how he came to focus on the home front of the forever wars and the current relationship between the military and education, as well as how modern journalism undervalues undercover reporting. —Garrett M. Graff

[Editor’s note: The following conversation predated the U.S. attack on Iran.]

You and I are talking in mid-February, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is working to cut off basically all advanced military training and graduate program access to most of the top universities in the country. It seems we are living through this weird moment where the actual act of fighting a war is ever more technological — based in cyber weapons and drones and AI — and at the same time, we have a military leadership prioritizing how many kettlebell lifts you can do. How did you get interested in the question of military education?

My father was pretty involved in the anti-war movement during Vietnam, and much of that activism played out on college campuses. Something that really spooked the right from those days — and the military, frankly, as well — was [how] the humanities, and liberal arts more generally, created this space that cultivated zealous, intense, anti-war activism. My father was living proof of that. Howard Zinn was at Boston University during his time there, and really took him under his wing, exposed my father to his People’s History of the United States, and radicalized him in a way that dictated in some profound sense the rest of his life and his political worldview.

The strange echo with my father’s life is that he almost went to Valley Forge Military Academy — I wouldn’t find this out until I began investigating the school for Mother Jones a couple of years back. He grew up just outside of Philadelphia, [was] raised in an unstable family, and from an early age wanted to get out. Back then, and today as well, the most well-promoted path for young boys looking for a new community or an escape or many other things, is the military. Valley Forge was just down the road and he almost took that path.

As I was writing about Valley Forge a couple years ago and the issues plaguing this military academy, I started thinking more universally. I connected the dots of my father’s life about how profound education is in general, and just how significant the military’s influence over education and the rearing of American boys is — whether that’s through military schools, Valley Forge or West Point, or via Pentagon grants, ROTC, [the] Boy Scouts, or all these other avenues.

What has always been interesting to me about your work is that you have made a career out of covering the military without ever actually covering combat. You’re interested, it seems, in the questions of before combat and after combat, the training of our military in the case of this book or, in a lot of your other work, veterans when they come home. How did that career interest develop and unfold?

It happened purely by chance. I graduated from college in 2015 [and] by that time the appetite and resources for embedding overseas covering conflict had essentially dried up. That’s obviously painting in broad strokes — there were many great war reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan there till the very end — but I basically experienced the war through other people’s writing.

Where I saw the story as I graduated was in the lives of veterans returning home, in the myriad offices of the military-industrial complex, and then also the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Defense Department and VA are the two largest federal agencies, and I figured that there was a lot to explore. Plus the other crucial thing is that being in Vermont as a stringer around that time, I came to cover Bernie Sanders as chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. When I landed in D.C. the summer of 2014, there was this massive wait time scandal at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Phoenix [and] very quickly, I just fell into this. From there, this larger world expanded out — one, frankly, that I felt was under covered. There seemed no shortage of different avenues to explore.

Inside the U.S. military veterans’ fight for housing

Jasper Craven was a contributor to Home of the Brave, Long Lead’s award-winning multimedia feature on West LA’s unhoused veteran’s crisis. Chronicling a land grab dating back to the U.S. Civil War, this multi-part report is a tale that overflows with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death. At its core, the it seeks to answer the simple question: Why are veterans living in the street?

The answer may be found in the courts. In the waning days of the Long Lead investigation, a group of veterans filed Powers v. McDonough, a class action lawsuit between the federal government and disabled vets seeking permanent housing on the 388-acre West LA VA campus. Long Lead and Craven have been covering this lawsuit and the veterans’ continued fight for housing. Follow along by subscribing to the Home of the Brave newsletter here:

Home of the Brave — a Long Lead Newsletter

Daily court briefings and updates from Powers v. McDonough, the disabled veterans’ class action lawsuit against the federal government seeking permanent housing on the West LA VA campus

What have you learned about America in the 2020s through this lens of the inputs and outputs of what you generally refer to as the “forever wars” or more broadly, the “Global War on Terror”?

One of the core contradictions of this moment is that Americans, by and large, are skeptical and scarred by forever wars and leery of international conflicts. There’s a bone-deep feeling in America that the unprecedented outlays of taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon has deprived America of other domestic priorities. What I’ve come to understand is if you go to war for 20 years, there is just a tremendous amount of blowback domestically and scarring that happens at home, even if the battle itself is thousands of miles away. There’s a realization that these wars have really scarred this country in a pretty profound way.

But at the same time … there remains this stubborn germ where war feels like all America knows. It feels [like] the only thing we’re still “good” at is fighting. We know how to build weapons, we know how to sell weapons, and there is some resilient urge in many Americans to win — this thirst for triumphalism.

President Trump honestly understands that and is a very keen observer of all of these conflicting tensions. His foreign policy has been marked by these short blasts of military activity that don’t require the intense deployment and the forward operating bases and all of this stuff, but still scratch this itch that a lot of Americans still want this muscle on the world stage.

The Venezuela operation is a perfect example of that.

Absolutely.

What do you make of the moment that we are in right now, with the military’s renewed focus under Pete Hegseth on masculinity as the defining core competency of the military, which you wrote about for Baffler in September? Your book talks about two very different inputs to the military’s education system: how the military academies try to elevate fighters into gentlemen of class and distinction and knowledge, and then the private military schools that try to inculcate into students the masculinity necessary to be warriors.

The concept of masculinity itself has changed and warped over conflicts and generations, but what I see distinctly in Hegseth’s push is a campaign that I feel mirrors the POW/MIA movement that emerged after Vietnam. One of the main “coping mechanisms” after America’s loss in Vietnam by a certain class of reactionary politicians and certain Vietnam veterans was to find some way to scapegoat the loss and preserve the country’s prestige. The POW/MIA movement emerged to basically conjure this myth that America didn’t basically go hard enough in Vietnam — that we should have stayed there longer, that all these spineless politicians didn’t properly support the troops, [and that they] didn’t even bother to recover many of who remained imprisoned by America’s enemies.

Today, I argue Hegseth is elevating this very virile masculinity as the prime factor for military success, and stem[ming] from [that is] the fact that he has conveniently scapegoated women and minorities as the reasons why America lost the forever wars.

Post-9/11, women and people of color really were elevated in significant ways for the first time in the military and they, by all accounts, excelled. Hegseth, whose own masculinity and identity is tied to his military service, found it easy to point to them as the reasons for failure, rather than to interrogate his own behavior, his own training, and the military’s broader tactical missteps.

What did you learn about the military in the course of writing the book that you did not understand when you started?

There was a lot of really fascinating archival material that I stumbled upon. Anytime you’re pitching a magazine article or a book, you make certain assumptions and hope that once you really dig into things, they bear out. My working thesis — based largely on reporting on a single school, Valley Forge — was that the entire enterprise of military training had fundamentally been formed around a core idea of American masculinity.

Just looking at the life and methods of West Point’s godfather, Sylvanus Thayer, who really influenced not only West Point’s curriculum to this day, but virtually every other military school that’s been formed in its wake. He was a figure who had daddy issues and who, as a boy, became romantically entranced by the idea of a uniform. It was striking to see even at the dawn of America, how this allure of military service to boys featured the same beats that I and countless other American boys feel at some point in our childhood.

You have this new article out in Harper’s this month on sports gambling. Tell me a little bit about it — the problem of the sports betting and gambling epidemic in America feels very much the same story of the crisis in masculinity and young men in America as much of your other reporting on the military.

That is dead on. I’m trying to slightly reconceive of my repertorial focus as men’s issues, masculinity, and the military. I do see them all as very closely intertwined. Sports gambling is yet another red flashing warning sign about the profound sense of isolation and hopelessness that American men have. Some of that energy is misogynistic and reactionary and racist, xenophobic. … I really see the rise of sports gambling as a symptom that applies universally to men and women — a world, or at least a country, whose politics are seemingly stagnant and corrupted, where the economy feels rigged, and all of these traditional avenues for meaning and economic security and identity feel closed off.

Gambling offers this new opportunity to form an identity, to become an expert. There are many men who really pride themselves on knowing a team, the stats, and predicting the outcomes. There can be a lot of ego built into this practice. … When everything else feels rotten and there’s nothing to hang on to, there’s this energy to try to profit off of that cultural and political decline.

What story of yours are you proudest of?

My story about the security guard industry in America. I worked for six months part-time as a security guard at a bank in Manhattan. [I’d] mostly covered military and veterans’ issues exclusively for about 10 years, and that was my first movement out of that specific beat and into something that felt interconnected, but distinct. Covering the security industry and being a security guard really helped illuminate some of the military ideas and themes that have spilled into the cultural groundwater and are animating masculinity today. That was very helpful for me to connect these two worlds.

What is the best or most helpful journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?

Buy LinkedIn Premium and use it as a tool for source development. This doesn’t apply to every beat, I suppose, but for most reporters out there, LinkedIn can be a really vital reporting tool — [for] both finding people and searching for people who work or have worked in specific industries, government agencies, corporations, or nonprofits.

When I get a juicy tip that feels promising, my first stop will be LinkedIn. I will try to gut-check the tip and corroborate it by connecting to relevant people in an industry or at the relevant company. It’s really great for building out a network of sources.

What is a widely accepted journalistic rule or norm that you hate?

The practice of reporting undercover is generally looked down upon in polite journalistic circles these days. I can certainly understand some of that concern — I don’t think a journalist should ever lie about themselves or dupe a person they’re interacting with — but there is a long and proud tradition of reporters working in some undercover capacity to expose wrongdoing, going all the way back to Ida B. Wells.

I found working as a security guard for six months quasi-undercover that there was just much more nuance that I was able to glean than if I had just interviewed two dozen security guards.

What led you to journalism in the first place?

It’s a boring answer, but the movie All the President’s Men. Robert Redford, man, sexy as hell, cool as hell, Dustin Hoffman. It was that simple. My folks are filmmakers. They showed me a lot of movies when I was a kid, and that one just completely lit up my mind. I’ve always been curious, and I view a journalist’s role to some extent as similar to a private investigator or a detective in some sense. We certainly watched a bunch of old film noir with my folks as well, and surfacing new information was presented to me as a kid in such romantic ways with these movies. It was that simple.

Do you have hope or fear or both for journalism right now and why?

I am hopeful, but it’s a qualified answer. I feel very worried about the young crop of journalists coming up below me. As I look to the internships and infrastructure that helped me get a foothold in this industry, I see a lot of degradation and outlets shuttering. AI is wiping away many entry-level jobs in media and other industries.

At the same time — and maybe this is less hopeful and more delusional — I do believe in the public’s undying thirst for information with integrity, and I do foresee a backlash to AI and the junk information that it presents. I’m hopeful that there will be a backlash and that there will be newfound energy for information with integrity.

Plus, I just can’t see how any of these AI programs could effectively report out a story and surface new information. They’re entirely predicated on just chewing over what already exists. I have to believe that journalism will remain crucial to surfacing new information.

Further reading from Jasper Craven:

• “On Tilt: America’s Gambling Epidemic” (Harper’s Magazine, February 2026)

• “Hazing, Fighting, Sexual Assaults: How Valley Forge Military Academy Devolved into ‘Lord of the Flies’” (Mother Jones, April 2022)

• “Home of the Brave” (Long Lead, June 2024)

• “The Thin Purple Line” (Harper’s Magazine, September 2024)

• “Battle of the Sexes” (The Baffler, September 2025)

In the early 2000s, photographer Thomas Dworzak and journalist Christian Caryl traveled to a secret location in Chechnya, one of Russia’s borderland republics, to meet a fugitive commander. They spent “half a week hidden in a safe house, watching Soviet TV comedies, and eating boiled sheep.” The commander never showed up.

Now they’re together again, collaborating on a new feature for Long Lead. Their photo-first feature, Border Line War, is built off a line borrowed from Vladimir Putin: “Russia’s borders end nowhere.” Covering the Russian mining settlement on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago to the steppes of eastern Kazakhstan, Caryl’s analysis lays out the geopolitical reality of Putin’s stealth assault on his neighbors (hybrid warfare, election interference, Russian money flowing to politicians across six European countries) while Dworzak’s photographs go somewhere else entirely.

There’s no combat in these images. No rubble, no refugees in motion. Instead, there are monuments, museums, military training exercises, Victory Day concerts staged across a river, and Polish live action role players (LARPers) spending a weekend pretending to live in an American trailer park. As Dworzak puts it, “There is no war, except Ukraine.” But soon there might be, and these pictures are what that in-between feels like.

Dworzak has been a member of the Magnum Photos cooperative since 2004 and was the group’s president from 2017 to 2020. He’s been working in the post-Soviet world since his early 20s. He lived in Tbilisi, Georgia through the 1990s, covering the wars in Chechnya, Abkhazia, and Karabakh. His book, Taliban, published in 2003, collected retouched studio portraits of Taliban fighters that he found in photo shops in Kandahar after the regime fled the city. More recently, Khidi — The Bridge (2021) paired 15 years’ worth of photographs of Georgian soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with a feature-film screenplay.

Dworzak grew up six kilometers from the Iron Curtain in Bavaria. The border was closed. He never crossed it and never met anyone who did. Now, he says, that same divide has moved 500 kilometers east, and it feels familiar.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Dworzak about how this new feature came together, what it’s like to photograph places he’s known for decades as they brace for a war that may or may not be coming, and why he’s more fascinated by the fake than the real. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Parker Molloy

Where are you based now? You’ve lived in so many places over the years — Georgia, Germany, France. Where’s home at this point?

I’ve always had a connection to France since my high school time in the 1980s and [I’ve] had a flat there since the late ‘90s. And since 2015, I don’t live anywhere else. I only live in Paris.

You’ve talked about growing up in a small town in Bavaria and wanting to get out. You bought a ticket to Belfast at 15- or 16-years-old to see what war looked like, ended up too scared to photograph the soldiers, and took pictures of the sky instead. What was it about that experience that made you think, “This is what I want to do with my life?”

I didn’t choose to take pictures of the sky. I fucked up, so I took pictures of the sky. I thought I would take pictures of the soldiers. I don’t think I was naturally predestined. Going to Belfast, it wasn’t a rewarding experience. I was curious, but it was also a horrible challenge. I didn’t like it. I was very worried about it. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I went to a war and I felt really great about it.” No, I felt really bad. But I thought it was what I had to do. I think in a way it was the biggest challenge, coming from this very dull 1980s West Germany small town. I thought this was the most radical thing to do. Almost the most challenging.

You didn’t study photography, and you went to the Caucasus in the early ‘90s without any preconceptions about what images were supposed to look like. Do you think that lack of formal training shaped the kind of photographer you became?

I think it was good. At that time, you say, “I want to be a war photographer” — what are you going to do? There were no workshops, classes, studying. Now you can do a course or whatever. At the time there was no internet. There was nothing. One of the biggest problems I had is I didn’t know how to go about becoming a photographer. You want to become a lawyer, you study law, you become a lawyer. But there was nothing. So in a way I had to figure it out myself. I started studying languages and I traveled… So I did it on my own.

If I had been exposed to the full amount of photography one is exposed to currently in the modern world, I think I would have been totally intimidated. I would have had this feeling of, “Well, what else am I going to do? Everything has been done.” In the Caucasus, it was a very natural, healthy way of doing it. I was like, “Look, I’m really fascinated by this place and I want to make pictures of it.” Until the Caucasus, it didn’t make any sense what I was doing. It was just carrying a camera around. But there, it sort of clicked.

The latest from Long Lead:

Years of reporting across thousands of miles. A global power imposing itself on other countries without restraint. A view of the world as you’ve never seen it before. Read Border Line War, the latest from Long Lead, produced in collaboration with Magnum Photos.

How did Border Line War start, and how did you and Christian Caryl end up working together on it?

My whole life, I would always go to conflict. When I moved to Paris, I had definitely moved away from [capturing] day-to-day conflict. It wasn’t a time in my life where I would try to run off because there’s a war in Iraq or something in Haiti.

So when Ukraine started, it was very complicated for me. What am I going to do now? I’m 50 years old. Am I going to move to Kyiv? And there was a sort of déjà vu. I’ve been running from Putin’s bombs so many times in my life, I didn’t want to do it. I’m married, I’m older. So there was this whole complicated thing. In the end, I didn’t go. I did not rush to Ukraine like everybody else did.

Although I had only been to Ukraine twice or three times, I was really almost all the time in Russia and the Caucasus. Ukraine was sort of on the way through. But of course Ukraine feels familiar. It’s part of this post-Soviet world. At the time I could speak Russian. It was this post-Soviet way of how everything works — very familiar.

Anyway, I didn’t go, but I thought, “What am I going to do? This is so much my corner of the world. What can I do? How am I going to deal with it?” And then I looked at it and I felt there was a sort of over-coverage of Ukraine, strangely, at a certain time. We kind of knew what was going on in Ukraine, but there were all these other places. So I decided to look at them and started the project. A lot of these places had been on my periphery — the Baltics, Central Asia — but I hadn’t really been there before. About a year later, I did end up going to Ukraine. But mostly I spent my time traveling along this new Iron Curtain.

I grew up six kilometers from the old Iron Curtain. For me, the old Iron Curtain was a very defining thing in my life. It was the end of the world. The border was pretty much closed. I never crossed. I never met anyone who crossed. There was a lot of fear of war, [of] an invasion, [of] the Russians coming. So in a way, the thing that defined my childhood has now moved 500 kilometers to the east, but it’s coming up in a similar way.

I met Christian in Moscow in the early 2000s. We once had an assignment together where we would go and meet a fugitive Chechen commander in a secret location in Chechnya. All very cloak and dagger. We ended up spending half a week hidden in a safe house, watching Soviet TV comedies, eating boiled sheep, and the commander never materialized.

Some of the images go back to 2023, others are from 2025. Were you shooting with this specific essay in mind from the start, or did you realize at some point that work you’d been doing across these countries was really part of one project?

No, it became part of that. I came up with the idea and I started to trace this line. I sort of extended it. I started with the Baltics and then I was like, “Oh, we also need the Balkans, we also need the Caucasus.” The project kept getting longer, and I decided to follow the line all the way until it “evaporates” in eastern Kazakhstan.

There’s no direct conflict in these images. It’s monuments, museums, rehearsals, training exercises, TV screens, parades. For a feature about the threat of Russian aggression, that’s a striking choice. How did you arrive at that approach?

Well, there is no war, except Ukraine. There is a hybrid war, but practically — look, I don’t have the means to drive around Eastern Europe waiting for a drone to hit a field in Poland, and it’s not going to be visually that interesting. There are many places that are very tense, very loaded. But otherwise, they’re not shooting at each other. Unlike in Ukraine, there is no war.

Sometimes I felt, could this be the last summer before the war? I don’t know what’s going to happen. There are people who think it’s going to happen very soon. There are preparations — people train, security. It’s not as dramatic as a real war, of course. But I had done a World War I project in the mid-2010s, around the anniversary, which in a certain way taught me to find more abstract, sometimes historical things.

I chose to go to a lot of museums, look at the stuff that is the historical component, bring this in. Those tensions, that’s what I do.

Tehran is one of the places you’ve called home, and you’re publishing this essay about imperial overreach while the U.S. and Israel are bombing that city. I wanted to give you space to talk about that if you want to.

I’ve dealt with Russian imperialism in this whole thing — Russian expansion, Russian nationalism in the Caucasus, in Georgia, in the whole ex-Soviet Union, [and] now in Ukraine. In a way, it’s all connected.

What I find is that in the last month, the whole shift of tension — I don’t think anything has changed on the Iron Curtain. This project is from 2023 to now. Everything from 2023 is still relevant now. We’re still in this phase. Now something else has come up — maybe because of our attention span — and it’s all moved that way. Right now it feels a little off the agenda, because we’re talking [so much] about the Middle East. But it hasn’t really changed.

If there was a real change, the whole body of work would suddenly have a totally different significance. If something happens, this would suddenly become history. It’s not history yet. Maybe it’s never going to be, who knows. But it’s still building up.

The piece ends on the Polish LARPers, where Europeans spend a weekend role-playing life in an American trailer park. That’s an extraordinary image to close on. How did you find that, and whose idea was it to end the piece there?

It was my idea. Parallel to this, I’ve been obsessed with war games — in a way as a reaction to me covering real wars for so long. I feel I’m entitled to do it because I’ve done the real things. I want to do the fake after the real. And in a certain way, I’m often much more fascinated by the fake. It fits with my life now. I had a great time at the Polish LARP.

For me, it was very important to define the border of this project very clearly. I’m not stepping into Russian-controlled territory. I spent 30 years of my life running around in the Soviet Union on the Russian side. Now I’m not going anywhere under Russian control. I don’t go to occupied territories. I don’t go to Transnistria. I don’t go to Abkhazia. Of course I could, and it could make sense along this undefined line, but I thought that was very important to stay on this side with a very clear line.

And there is a sort of decline in American presence, which I’ve seen. There aren’t so many in-your-face American things anymore. I remember there was a time when there was more Americana. You hardly see any American influence anymore. So the LARP was an extreme exception: “Oh, they’re actually playing a really American thing in Poland.”

After 35-plus years of photographing conflict and its aftermath across dozens of countries, what keeps you going?

I have definitely slowed down on the conflicts, honestly. My life, my job has changed a lot. I am older, married now. It’s funny, in a way I am back to where I started — working on longer, bigger, slower projects. Scratching together the funds. Previously, I was living in two-week cycles. I spent a long time really rushing from one thing to another. You don’t really have time to think.

I don’t have these jobs anymore. It forces me to focus. Think. It’s good.

Further viewing from Thomas Dworzak:

• Taliban (Trolley Books, 2003)

• War Games (Magnum Photos, Feb. 20, 2017)

• “Enlisting in the ‘forever war’: the untold story of Georgian soldiers in Afghanistan” (New East Digital Archive, Nov. 26, 2021)

• Digital footprints on the dark side of Geneva (Coda, June 15, 2023)

• “Contrarian Photographer” (Truth in Photography, April 2023)

Anthony Breznican had “no ambition” to spend his days interviewing Hollywood’s bold-faced names, including Steven Spielberg, multiple times. He certainly couldn’t have predicted a long, chatty car ride with Bono and The Edge who were on their way to meet Robert Redford for several shots of Bushmills whiskey. But if you work as a general assignment reporter in Los Angeles, which Breznican did after getting his start with the Associated Press in Pittsburgh, it’s practically inevitable that you’ll end up talking to a Hollywood star or two.

When it comes to the entertainment business, says Breznican, LA is a “company town.” So along with covering the usual general assignment fare, Breznican got to field calls for the Oscars, helped other reporters cover the Emmys, and, eventually, started taking on some entertainment pieces of his own.

Turns out it was a good fit for a guy who, as a kid, read Premiere and papered his bedroom with movie posters purchased from the local video store. “​​It’s just something I got lucky with, and then I found that I really loved it. I love discovering how creative people work,” he says.

After the AP, Breznican continued covering the entertainment world as a staff writer for USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and Vanity Fair. In 2025, he lost his job in a round of layoffs at VF. Competitors of his former workplace were more than happy to avail themselves of Breznican’s talent and he has been working as a full-time freelance writer ever since. Along with his magazine work, Breznican has a growing list of book titles. His latest, Star Wars Icons: Darth Vader, will be on store shelves this July.

Depth Perception spoke with Breznican about the lessons he’s learned about the creative process and how covering the Oscars has changed from his early days on the entertainment beat. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Jenna Schnuer

How has interviewing celebrities changed over the years? It seems like people are more guarded and certainly have more media training. What does it take for you to get to the real story of a famous person’s life or work?

Whenever I ask a question that [could be] controversial [and] I know it’ll be tense — like every reporter braces for that moment in the interview — I always think about, “What am I trying to achieve here? Am I just trying to remind them of a painful thing that happened, or is there an actual question?” And most of the time, there is a question there. And the question, I think, is, “Can you explain yourself? Can you explain this?” And you can push back on that to a degree, but ultimately, your job is to ask that question.

If [the public is] mad about something online [and you’re asking the actor or director to respond to it], the best you can do is say, “What is your rationale? What is your response?” And it’s not that you’re just taking down the transcription. You can push around the edges if they’re dodging or they’re lying. You have to push back on that. But I think mainly what you’ve got to do is ask the question that people want to have answered.

There’s a lot more media training these days. People are more careful. With social media, people seem to be just trying to shape their image a little bit more. How has it changed for you as a reporter on the entertainment beat?

I think the difference between now and maybe 10 to 15 years ago, is that now things get taken out of context [by the public] much more quickly. I think that happens because there are individuals on social media who have derived followings from outrage, and so they are on the hunt every day for something to be pissed off about. Something to take out of the story, examine in the least charitable light, and create a problem for that person on this day. I see this all the time. And I think people who are interviewed regularly see it too, and they think, I just don’t want to say anything, because anything I say that is an opinion will get turned on and people will pile on.

So that has led to a lot of people not wanting to do interviews, or wanting to do five minute interviews instead of a conversation. Who say, “Can I play with a puppy on camera and or do a lie detector test?” People just don’t want to say what’s on their mind and I think that’s a pity. Saying what’s on your mind is how we open people’s minds, and how you sharpen your own opinion. We used to be more tolerant if we disagreed. Now, there’s just this funnel of outrage that rises up every day like a tornado and sucks in whatever it can and spits out debris.

Coming soon: The latest from Long Lead

Years of reporting across thousands of miles. A global power imposing itself on other countries without restraint. A view of the world as you’ve never seen it before.

Later this month, Long Lead will publish its next feature. It’s a staggeringly vast international report produced by some of the world’s best independent journalists that sets the stage for an uncertain future. Be the first to read it — subscribe to the free Long Lead newsletter, today.

How do you handle that while trying to do your job, while trying to go deeper into a person’s story?

All I can do is try to be as straightforward, as honest as I can. I think I have a good reputation in that area, such that if I ask something that I know is a provocative subject, they know that it’ll be treated fairly. I can’t control whether they just hold back because they don’t want to say anything.

If you were starting now, do you think you would want to get into entertainment journalism? Are you enjoying it as much now?

I got into it just because I was interested in people, and that’s why general assignment news appealed to me. I was interested in people and telling their stories. And it wasn’t like I felt like entertainment was the thing I had to do.

When I got laid off in August from Vanity Fair, there [were] financial worries that [came] with that, but my other major worry was, I love this job so much. I hope I still get to do it. Fortunately, Esquire, Empire Magazine, and other publications stepped up right away, and I didn’t have far to fall. I’m very grateful for that. So I’ve been able to keep doing it and doing it even at a higher caliber, I think. I’m in love with this work. I still get excited by it. I’m grateful for the relationships I have, and always happy to meet somebody new.

You mentioned the creative process as one of the reasons you’re particularly keen on covering entertainment. What have you learned about it over the years?

I really enjoy dissecting a story to understand why it moves us. What I get to do in this job that I’ve had for almost 25 years now is I get to talk to the people who make [stories] about what they mean. And sometimes they don’t know while they’re making [a movie] what it’s about until they get a little space on it.

I think everybody is trying their best in most cases. Every now and then you get some cynical product that nobody really believes in [but they do] for a paycheck. And that’s separate. But there are people like Adam Sandler, who doesn’t get a lot of critical love [for his comedies]. People like his dramatic work, they don’t like his comedies. He puts a lot of work into those comedies, and I think the way they resonate with fans is a testament to that. They make people happy and make them laugh, and it strikes a nerve. It’s not by accident. I don’t think he’s sloppy about his work, he puts a lot of heart into it. I’m not a good critic, because I’m always trying to give the benefit of the doubt [and] understand what it is that the person put into it. And that doesn’t mean I can’t write a critical story or ask a hard question. I definitely do that. But I’m interested in the chemistry of how things happen, and sometimes in that chemistry is a flare up.

The 2026 Academy Awards are upon us. Are the awards as important as they were when you started out? How has reporting on the Oscars changed?

I’ve noticed the Oscars, as an organization, have gotten more restrictive about how journalists cover them. They’re diminished in their reach. I think the public has lost a lot of interest in awards. It’s not gone completely, but I feel like there’s diminishing interest over the past two decades, and maybe that has led them to [be more protective about] the show … more self conscious, so therefore less access.

As a young journalist, I got to know the people at the Academy, and once I had established myself a little bit, they let me have a crew badge. Watching the Oscars from the wings of the stage was an exciting thing to do, the story had to be filed that night — live. I would phone in elements of the story, things I witnessed as a fly on the wall backstage. There’s such high emotion back there, most of it jubilant, and wonderful interactions between people you never see together. If I hadn’t been there, those stories would be lost to history.

Which story are you proudest of?

The one I’m proudest of is I wrote the obituary for my friend and my teacher John Carosella. He was my high school English teacher [at St. Joseph’s High School in Natrona Heights, PA] who was very patient with me, who saw things in me that I didn’t see, let alone anyone else. He inspired a kind of critical way of looking at things, examining them and understanding them. And I can remember virtually every poem, every book, and every short story he taught.

We never lost touch. We stayed very close. And when he died, his family asked me to write his obituary, which was a hard thing to do. But I’m very proud of that story because I’m very proud of him and the life that he led. And I got to say why he mattered, not just to me, but what was important to him. And in our conversations before he passed away from cancer, he told me some of the things that motivated him. He told me some things from his life that I got to put into that story. So it was almost like an interview, right?

What’s the worst journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?

I had an editor who said to me, “You’re too sentimental.” I was going to disagree with him, [but] I thought, “No, that’s right. I am sentimental.” And I think you can go too far with that. You don’t want to be a sappy writer or something. But I try to write about things that mean something to me, even if they’re silly, you know.

Best journalistic advice?

There was a gentleman named Bob Thomas who’d been covering Hollywood for the Associated Press since … the 1940s and he’d have interviews with Betty Grable, Abbott and Costello, Humphrey Bogart. I loved reading his old work. Sometimes I go to the newspaper archive and search up articles that Bob wrote.

He’s gone now, but he was a pretty old man by the time I met him. And he would go to the AFI Lifetime Achievement Awards. He always did an interview with the person who got that [award] and one year it was Harrison Ford. And I was like, “What’s it like talking to him?”

And Bob said: “He’s smarter than you think, but he speaks slowly and that’s because he’s thinking … He speaks in short sentences and when he goes quiet you have to remember to be quiet too because if you fill that void, he’ll stop and you’ll just move on to the next thing. So a good thing to do —” and then he would just nod his head and not say anything. He said, “If you have to say ‘go on’ or ‘tell me more,’ then say that, but don’t talk too much.”

He’s right. You can get nervous when somebody is being thoughtful and you fill the void and they stop down that line of expression. You have got to learn to be quiet and let the silence fill itself.

Further reading from Anthony Breznican:

• “Robert Duvall was Fearsome and Tender. He’ll Stay a Legend Forever” (Esquire, Feb. 16, 2026)

• “Sinners Will Rule on Oscar Night. But it Already Won.” (Esquire, Jan. 22, 2026)

• “‘This Cannot Be Right.’ How the Gun in Alec Baldwin’s Hands Turned the Rust Set Deadly” (Vanity Fair, Feb. 18, 2022)

• The Marvel Cinematic Universe: An Official Timeline (DK, 2023)

• Star Wars Icons: Darth Vader (Insight Editors, 2026)

In March 2012, Jelani Cobb published his first of many pieces for The New Yorker. It was an essay on the recent killing of Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager whose death helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement. “[Our] worst problem is not cynicism,” the author, journalist, and historian concluded in the piece, “it’s the frequency with which that cynicism proves accurate.”

“Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope” set the course of Cobb’s next decade-plus of written work, now collected in his book Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025. “I really do not go for light subject matter,” he tells Depth Perception with a laugh.

“In the book, I cover some of the things related to the rise of white nationalism, the rise of the kind of truculent populism that Donald Trump mainstreamed, and the political tributaries that fed into the moment,” says Cobb, a former associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “You have to connect the dots. You’ll be like, ‘Oh, I remember when this happened,’ or ‘I’d forgotten that this happened with Charlottesville’ or so on.”

In 2018, Cobb, by then a staff writer at The New Yorker, was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary for his work at the magazine. Then in 2022, after six years as a professor at Columbia Journalism School, he became the dean of the institution. He calls Three or More Is a Riot, released in October, “an appetizer” for his book-in-progress, The Half-Life of Freedom, which covers similar terrain: “race, democracy, and demagogues.”

In this edition of Depth Perception, Cobb discusses his growth as a writer, some recent controversies at Columbia, and why he considers journalism school perhaps more important than ever. (Full disclosure: I am an adjunct at Columbia Journalism School.) —Mark Yarm

Why did you become a journalist?

There’s probably a throughline with people who are journalists to curiosity, or a less charitable version of that would be nosiness. A love of finding out things — your job being to get smarter. If you’re out working every day, you should come back with information that you didn’t have before and be able to share that with the public.

I tell my students this all the time: “We can talk about these weighty, ethical things and this responsibility to democracy until the sun goes down, but fundamentally, we all do this because it’s fun.” We like doing it — putting together a story and fact checking it. There’s a particular kind of masochistic joy that comes out of that.

What piece of yours from Three or More Is a Riot are you most proud of?

It’s probably the first piece that’s in the collection, which originally ran as “Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope” in The New Yorker. The reason I say that I’m particularly proud of that piece is that it’s the first thing I ever wrote for The New Yorker. I was so anxious about it that I went to the Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture] in New York and wrote the piece there. My logic being that since I had written large portions of my doctoral dissertation there, I should be able to write a thousand-word Comment [essay] with no problem.

Long Lead: Journalism without compromise

Journalism stands at a critical inflection point. For decades the industry has battled with widespread burnout, the rapid commoditization of creative labor, and a flood of ephemeral content (both human and synthetic) that is forgotten the moment it leaves our newsfeeds. Meanwhile, trust from news consumers has eroded, rotted by a diet of disposable information that offers little lasting substance.

Since 2021, Long Lead has proven our guiding principle, “journalism without compromise,” is more than just an ideal. Partnering with the world’s best independent journalists, we’ve produced enduring, relevant features that surprise and delight.

That looks like a gripping, encyclopedic examination of less-lethal projectiles that’s informed protestors for years. It’s a multi-year investigation into the cause and consequences of an endemic veteran homelessness crisis that was nominated for two National Magazine Awards. It’s a #1-ranked, Peabody Award-nominated podcast that explains everything from the rise of America’s far right to how tech broke the internet. And it’s visually rich journalism that the Webby Awards named the Best Individual Editorial Feature in each of the past three years.

Later this month, Long Lead will publish its next feature. As ever, it’s a big story by some of the world’s best independent journalists that presents the world in a way you’ve never seen it before. Be the first to read it — subscribe to the free Long Lead newsletter, today.

In the book’s epilogue, you write that reading your old pieces “inspired a reckoning with not simply what I wrote, but with who I was when I wrote it.” How have you seen yourself change as a person and as a writer in the last decade and a half?

I have a more seasoned perspective. I was probably more idealistic then than I am now. I certainly didn’t have the vantage point of what it has been like for the past decade that our national affairs have been guided by Donald Trump, a man who was wholly unfit for the presidency, and the kind of destruction and wreckage that he’s brought to American civic life.

I had one child 15 years ago. I now have four. I talk a little bit about my children in the collection. As children are wont to do, they give you a different understanding of the importance of the things that you’re doing and the subject that you’re writing about, and the world that you would hope that they inherit. Also, though it’s kind of weird to say, while I was more idealistic then, I think I’ve developed a more intimate relationship with journalism — my love for what it is and what it can do and what it can achieve.

You mentioned having four children. You’ve been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015 and the dean of Columbia Journalism School since 2022. How do you balance all these demanding jobs?

I really don’t. I just work until I pass out. No… interestingly enough, here’s something that people outside of this building may not have noticed, but the last three deans of Columbia Journalism School have all been staff writers at The New Yorker: Steve Coll before me and Nick Lemann before him. I talked to both of them about balance and still wanting to do my work and be actively engaged. Both of them said that they had done large chunks of their journalism in the summer and winter breaks. So I have a reporting trip planned for spring break to knock out a story that I’ve been working on for a while. And a Comment, you know, I can work on that over a weekend.

One of the questions we ask a lot of our interviewees is, very simply, Journalism school: yay or nay? You’re biased, of course, but what are the arguments for attending J-school in 2026 when the profession feels like it’s in freefall?

I think the argument for attending journalism school becomes more clear under these circumstances, not less so. Lest I sound like a salesman, let me say more about that. We have a cliché in every movie that involves a newsroom or a reporter. There’s the grizzled city editor who has known the mayor since he was a fresh-faced law student or an intern somewhere and is on a first-name basis with everyone in the city. This is the person that is the heart and soul of the newspaper. That person doesn’t exist anymore. That person took a buyout years ago, and the kind of mentorship that was available through the auspices of those people who’ve been in the newsroom forever is not easy to come by. Journalism school is really increasingly necessary because there are fewer sources for people to get that information from.

The other thing is this, our graduates consistently outperform the market. In a market like this, people tend to hire the people who they think are most highly qualified and most highly trained, and because of the reputation of the school and the tradition of excellence at the school, that translates into significant advantages in the labor market.

What are the biggest challenges of running a journalism school in 2026? I don’t know the statistics, but I’m guessing enrollment is down at Columbia Journalism School?

I don’t get into too much detail, but there’s a general declining trend in journalism school enrollment. So there’s that. There’s skepticism, [like in] the very question that you just raised, “Why should I go to journalism school?” And then even outside of that, it’s not simply a referendum on journalism education. It’s a referendum on journalism itself, because a lot of times people think this career is not a viable path for them. We have to grapple with having to create, or help create, courses and symposia and different kinds of programming that align with the needs of the market. You know, what are we doing with AI? Are we making sure that all our people are fully capable of utilizing it in the news gathering, in the ways that we want people to use it? And then staying away from the ways that we don’t want people to use AI?

Does Columbia Journalism School have any sort of guidelines on AI and journalism?

Yeah, we came up with an AI working group right after ChatGPT debuted, and we borrowed a line from the AP’s AI protocols, which is that “AI should be treated as an unvetted source.” Nothing can be turned in that is not 100% the work of the journalist in the class. But we also encouraged faculty to not adopt a fearful approach to this technology, because there are uses.

For instance, I teach opinion writing, and one of the things that I encourage my students to do is after they have finished a draft of their column for that week, they should request a counterargument from ChatGPT or whatever AI you’re using. One of my colleagues, Azmat Khan, who’s done really important work on civilian casualties of drones and other kinds of bombing, is utilizing AI to be able to recognize bomb craters that might not otherwise stand out on satellite imagery. So that will certainly expedite how quickly that work can be done.

Over the past couple of years at Columbia, you’ve seen student protests over the Israel-Hamas war and the university agreeing to a $200 million settlement with the Trump administration over accusations that the school failed to protect its Jewish students. Given that this is all happening in your backyard, do you think you’ll write about this?

My running joke is that whenever someone asks about what it’s like at Columbia, I would say, “Well, it will make an interesting chapter in my memoir.” But I don’t have any plans to write about it.

You made your thoughts on President Trump clear earlier. Did that $200 million settlement disappoint you?

What I would say is that my chief concern has always been not how we navigated the situation, but the fact that we were in the situation in the first place. I think probably all of the faculty, or all of the leadership of Columbia, takes the issue of belonging seriously. And the issue of dignity for students and equal treatment for students, we take that very seriously. At the same time, it’s very obvious that we’re being kicked around as a political football. But how does killing [$1.3 billion in federal] grants, most of which are medical, help us adopt new strategies to address antisemitism?

We’ve got some recurring questions we like to ask our subjects. Let’s start with, what is the best journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?

There’s a bunch of advice that I got from David Carr, who was the editor who gave me my first internship at the Washington City Paper and went on to become a legendary media columnist at The New York Times, and [was] an all-around character. Carr really drilled meticulousness into me. He would say, “How do you know this? Do you think it, or do you know?” His advice was basically double-check, triple-check. Be on top of your facts. Make sure that you have it right. If you don’t have it right, you apologize and you make it right. But really think about the seriousness of how you approach a story and what you give to the public under your name.

If you could write an all-access profile of anyone in the world who would it be and why?

I’m inclined to say Vladimir Putin. Even though I’ve not written a ton about it, I have these interests in Russia which are very longstanding. I wrote a doctoral dissertation that was heavily connected to Cold War history. So there’s that, but it also might be probably more efficacious to say the president. Part of it would be to have the fly-on-the-wall perspective. What does he do when nobody else is in the room, when he thinks that he’s alone? Is there any contrast between the public persona and the private person? What do the people who work for him really think of him?

What is the importance of long form journalism in particular these days?

Long form journalism is its own beast. There’s a particular kind of enjoyment that comes from getting lost in a story. And that doesn’t really happen until, like, the 3,000-word mark. Maybe it’s a dying pleasure, because the economics and the attention economy have pushed toward everything being much more succinct. But, with an all-access profile, if you’re talking about who a person is, or what their import is to life or culture or this particular discipline or undertaking, you have to build up a lot of context, and that takes some runway. There’s the appeal of the epic in fiction or in cinema or epic poetry, and long form journalism is our equivalent.

We’re talking not long after the bloodbath at The Washington Post, which really depressed me and a lot of other journalists. What keeps you hopeful for the future of journalism?

Charlie Sennott, who is co-founder of Report for America, which is a great organization that helps embed journalists in areas where there’s a dearth of them, said something when he was visiting campus that I thought really registered: “Starting a publication is almost akin to starting a restaurant. It never makes sense.” You know, restaurants famously have the highest failure rate of any business. And at the same time, when you walk out your door, depending on where you are, you can find a restaurant — someone has figured out the formula to survive.

I think that we’ll figure it out, because so much rests upon our ability to do this job. I also think, paradoxically, that if we were to strip away the dark storm clouds, what would become obvious to us is the fact that journalism is more dynamic now than it has been in 50 years. We’re trying all kinds of things that, if we weren’t talking about the collapse of the business model and AI and lack of trust and all the other kinds of things that dominate the landscape, we would be talking about just how amazing the innovations in the field are.

People are coming up with new business models. We were previously lazy in a way that had been bred by success. But now we have different types of distribution, different structures, we have just a huge number of nonprofit news organizations that are coming online, and people are actively trying to figure out what’s the most sustainable format for us. When a lot of smart people are all dedicated to trying to solve one question, we tend to make a lot of progress.

Further reading and viewing from Jelani Cobb:

• “Ryan Coogler’s Road to ‘Sinners’” (The New Yorker, April 28, 2025)

• “What ICE Should Have Learned from the Fugitive Slave Act” (The New Yorker, Jan. 30, 2026)

• “Columbia’s Jelani Cobb on His New Book of Essays, ‘Three or More Is a Riot’” (Columbia University YouTube channel, Oct. 15, 2025)

• The Riot Report (co-written with director Michelle Ferrari; aired on PBS, May 21, 2024)

• “Voting Rights and Immigration Under Attack” (The New Yorker, Nov. 2, 2025)

Elizabeth Flock never set out to write about complicated women beset by near-impossible challenges. But over the course of her career as an Emmy Award-winning journalist and author, that’s exactly the coherent thread that emerged from her coverage.

She has written about a young mother who claimed “stand your ground” after shooting and killing her husband, a 17-year-old who learned to wield a weapon the size of her torso to track down ISIS fighters in Syria, and two environmentalists who put the kibosh on pipeline infrastructure in the name of environmental urgency. These women, among others, and the stories that tumbled out of them, were defined above all by their formidable fight for justice by whatever means necessary.

“In my last book, women were fighting gender-based violence. In my first book, they were fighting for freedom within marriage,” Flock tells me. Her next book project, still in its research phase, is centered on the Polish biologist Simona Kossak and her battle to save one of Europe’s last old-growth forests. At least, that’s what it seems to be on the surface.

But it’s shaping up to be much more than that: Kossak died in 2007 and discovering her legacy has come at a time when Flock herself is navigating new motherhood after giving birth to her son in 2023. The experience sharpened her attention to questions of wisdom, care, and responsibility at the planetary scale, and how they work in concert to broaden the fight for justice.

“It’s weird to be on the trail of someone’s ghost. I just so desperately want to meet her, but I can’t. I just feel like I’m always just out of reach,” she says.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Flock reflects on how motherhood has reframed her understanding of the stories she pursues, and how tracing Kossak’s legacy is an entry point to interrogating what it truly means to nurture life in a world under threat. — Kelly Kimball

Let’s talk about your upcoming book and “The Migrants in the Ancient Forest,” your latest feature in The New Yorker that published earlier this week. They’re both centered on the Białowieża Forest, an ancient woodland along the Poland-Belarus border. What fascinated you about it?

When people write books, they usually have some burning question they’re desperate to answer. With this book project, I was postpartum in a swallowing Chicago winter, freezing, alone, feeling very lonely and desolate about the world. I came across the story of Simona Kossak, a Polish biologist who raised, nurtured, and studied wild animals in the Białowieża Forest.

There were all these photos of her taken by her lover, who was a photographer. Both the photos and the writing about her life immediately fascinated me. At that point, the burning question I had was: What is motherhood, and what is missing from that conversation? As a new mother, so much of what I was seeing online was very domestic — about buying things and presenting a certain way. It didn’t resonate with me at all. I was looking for a different model. Even though Simona wasn’t a biological mother of humans, there was something about her story I held onto immediately. There was something about her model of nurture that blended science and intuition, modern thinking and ancient ways of being. It felt like an answer to something I was missing more broadly, in how we’re living in a time of fear and instability.

So I followed a gut instinct, started researching her, and that became this larger book project.

Does this work also relate to current Poland-Belarus tensions, or is it more retrospective?

It’s mostly the story of Simona, but it’s also the story of this place. When I started reading about how much had happened there, I was shocked. Białowieża isn’t a forest I’d heard of before, but it’s as precious as the Amazon. It’s an ancient, primeval forest — one of the last wild places left in Europe, if not the world.

Despite minimal human intervention, so many things have happened there. The Nazis hunted Jewish people there. The Soviet Union was dissolved there. There have been major logging efforts that students and activists literally chained themselves to machines to stop. And now there’s a refugee crisis unfolding in the forest at the border.

Lifting Ukraine: One woman’s fight for her country’s survival

February 24 marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since that day, Ukraine’s “volonteri,” a loose network of civilian helpers central to the country’s fight for freedom, has bolstered its battle-worn government across the country.

In the Webby Award-winning Long Lead photo essay, Lifting Ukraine, photojournalist Maranie Staab presents a striking profile of one volunteer, world-record-setting powerlifter Anna Kurkurina, who has fought the Russian invasion in her own way by keeping her community active and fit, and by rescuing and rehoming animals orphaned by the war. In her country’s fight for independence, Kurkurina has an inspiring mission to ensure that more than just the strong will survive.

Read Lifting Ukraine today, and to learn about Long Lead’s next feature, subscribe to the Long Lead Newsletter here.

Can you tell me more about the refugee crisis?

This is probably the world’s only artificially created migration route. After a sham election in Belarus in 2020, the EU condemned the president [Alexander Lukashenko], and he retaliated by flooding the EU’s borders with migrants. He recruited people from unstable regions across the Middle East and Africa, literally placing ads saying, “Come to Belarus. We’ll get you safe passage into the EU.”

Thousands came, only to be beaten by both Belarusian and Polish border guards. People arrived from places like Somalia and Afghanistan, paid for a tour package, reached the border, and realized it was nearly impossible to cross. Poland and the EU have responded with a “borders-first” mindset, building a wall similar to the U.S.-Mexico border.

My [recent] New Yorker story looks at how this has evolved over four years. To me, this is huge. Asylum is a precious global institution and it’s being dismantled.

You’ve mentioned before that stories of nurturing and ancient wisdom are missing from the world and that your book hopes to resurrect it. Can you elaborate?

We are all aware that there are things that are not going well within our society, whether it’s teen suicide on the rise, or anxiety rates on the rise, or people’s dissatisfaction with economic instability. I think a lot of these things are linked.

As a person, as a journalist, and as a mom who’s raising a kid, I’m really searching for, “What is it that’s missing?” I’m not saying we should live like hunter-gatherers, but there are things we can learn from that time period. … As an editor, as a journalist, as a reader, you’re often feeling like, “OK, I get it. We have a climate crisis. It’s bad. What can I really do about it? Isn’t it up to other people to do something?” But I think on a deeper, more profound level, there is a disconnection from the natural world that is leading to all of this exploitation.

In the book Braiding Sweetgrass that Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote, she talks about something as simple as planting a garden: When you plant a garden in your backyard, even if you live in a city, you start to feel a connection to your food, and you start to think about where your food comes from. It’s not anything revolutionary, but it honestly starts to feel [that way], because it’s so different to eat something that you grew [yourself], as opposed to going to a grocery store [and buying] something that has probably a bunch of pesticides on it that maybe came from a plane ride away.

And so, to me, everything starts with reconnecting to the natural world and nurturing each other and our children and thinking seven generations ahead, [much like] Indigenous wisdom, which Simona incorporated into her work as well.

Your experience with motherhood was a guiding force in this book. Can you talk more about that?

The first story I did after giving birth was about women giving birth in Gaza, for Marie Claire. I could have done that story before, but it wouldn’t have had the same resonance. I wouldn’t have been able to ask the same questions. I think there’s so much that, until you have a kid, doesn’t make sense in the world; even really small things suddenly have clicked for me. I think motherhood [forces you] to face your demons, or your shadow work, or whatever it is, and that’s come through in my work as well.

Before [I had my kid], as an investigative journalist, I was chasing the problems: “How can I point them out? How can I shout from the rooftops?” Now, I have made that shift towards solutions and wisdom, taking a step back, looking at the bigger picture.

How does Simona embody this same ethos, even though she wasn’t a mother?

She was a scientist. People compared her to Jane Goodall. She was fiercely protective of the forest, often getting into brutal fights with humans.

At one point, [hunters] were trying to wipe out the deer population [in the Białowieża Forest] because they claimed it was hurting the forest. But really it was because they wanted to hunt them. Simona fiercely fought against that: She painstakingly, meticulously studied what deer eat over 10 years to show that they weren’t actually eating the trees.

Over the course of her life, she learned that fiercely battling against people wasn’t necessarily going to get her what she wanted. She made allies by the end with hunters and foresters — people you would not think she would make friends with. I interviewed some of those guys, and they’re the kind of guys that you wouldn’t expect an environmentalist to be friends with. She wouldn’t even call herself an environmentalist because she didn’t want to be put in that category.

Further reading and listening from Elizabeth Flock:

• “The Migrants in the Ancient Forest” (The New Yorker, Feb. 23, 2026)

• The Furies: Women, Vengeance, and Justice (Harper Perennial, released Jan. 7, 2025)

• “This CEO Helped Lead Antiabortion Clinics. Now She’s Exposing Them.” (Elle, Aug. 6, 2024)

• “The Blind Plea” (Lemonada, released May 17, 2023)

• “‘Now I’ve a purpose’: why more Kurdish women are choosing to fight” (The Guardian, July 19, 2021)

• “How Far Can Abused Women Go to Protect Themselves?” (The New Yorker, Jan. 13, 2020)

Traditional journalism has experienced several major disruptions over the past 25 or so years — as we’ve seen with the recent Washington Post layoffs — but independent journalism is currently seeing major growth. This is reminiscent, in some ways, of what we saw 20 years ago when little-known writers started making names for themselves in the world of blogging.

Josh Marshall, the founder of Talking Points Memo, was a well-known blogger in the 2000s. Since then, TPM has become something of a household name amongst readers.

Marshall started TPM as a personal blog in 2000. It launched while the U.S. presidential election that year was still up in the air — thanks to Florida’s count being hotly contested. Marshall covered that political mess and then went on to cover many Bush administration scandals.

His blog grew into a full-fledged political news publication later that decade, and it switched from an advertising business model to a subscription model in 2012. “One of the reasons TPM still exists is that we started a subscription program years ahead of everyone else,” Marshall says.

Marshall tells Depth Perception that he finds a lot of the things happening in independent journalism exciting, and he’s hoping that what’s being built now will be sustainable and help the industry flourish as a whole. —Thor Benson

You’ve witnessed the rise of independent journalism in recent years, and I’m sure you’ve seen the good and the bad of it. What are some standout examples to you of journalists or new outlets that seem to be on the right track?

Well, I think I’d put The Bulwark in that category. Are you familiar with Bolts Mag? Yeah, I think what they are doing is a good example. I think Defector is a good example. I mean, I could come up with a bunch more. Then there’s all the independents, which in some ways are an even bigger story.

It’s a funny thing, because for most of our history when we would think of competitor publications, they were usually much larger than us. Orders of magnitude larger than we were. The business models were very distinct. When we thought of peer publications, it was the same thing.

Now, in the last five or six years, there are lots of publications that are pretty similar in business terms. Pretty similar to what we do. You have anywhere from a handful of [employees] up to mid-double digits, subscription-based. It’s a funny thing. It’s a new and kind of gratifying thing for us.

Our model obviously has changed quite a lot over the history of TPM, and there was an early period when there was no business model. But for a long time, we were advertising-based and then we transitioned over a number of years to subscriptions. That was obviously a big, big change.

Who are some specific independent journalists you appreciate?

There’s so many. I subscribe to so many of them. Brian Beutler. He has Off Message. There’s Chris Geidner’s Substack. Everyone making a go of it on a Substack, or not a Substack. I’m all for Substacks. It makes me a little uncomfortable if any platform, even if it’s a relatively benign platform, has so much of the play. That feels like an element of dependence to me.

But they’ve made this possible to a great extent. We have one of our newsletters on Substack, in addition to our [owned-and-operated] ecosystem. We’ve worked at it for a long time. We have the capacity to do a lot of this stuff in-house. We have our own sort of membership platform and authentication platform. Not everyone can do that. It’s very, very hard to do that without a Substack-type thing.

I feel like it’s been an interesting trajectory over the past 20 years where a lot of big name journalists today were bloggers in the 2000s, then they went to legacy media or big new media companies, and now a lot of them are doing newsletters. What do you think are the similarities and differences between the blogging days and this newsletter situation?

Well, with a few exceptions, the sort of big, early bloggers were people who had either no or little experience in conventional journalism before they started. Everyone was a newcomer. Andrew Sullivan was a significant exception to that. Whereas now you have people who are former CNN anchors, right?

The other big thing is that there was really no business model in what people think of as the heyday of independent blogging. There was no way to make money from it. You could make trivial amounts of money with tip jars and stuff like that, [but] there was no business model until like 2003 or so. So that is very different.

There really were little or no platforms to do it on. For the first two-and-a-half or three years that I did TPM, I hand-coded each post individually. I wrote them in an HTML page, right? I wasn’t operating with a [content management system]. When I was in graduate school, I was designing websites. So there was a technical hurdle that you had to deal with. There are so many ways now, on so many different platforms, where we can just start doing stuff.

Another huge one is that everything that is happening now is happening in one sense or another in the social media ecosystem. All of these operations are really premised on social media as a way to get out the word that they exist. That’s a huge difference.

One other thing is that there was simply no acculturation that you would subscribe to something online. It took a long time for that to become a thing, and that was sort of what we were dealing with in 2012, 2013, and 2014 — just kind of getting people to think in those terms. One of the reasons TPM still exists is that we started a subscription program years ahead of everyone else. When [journalism] really started to fall apart in the late teens, we had already been building this for five or six years.

Bloggers changed the world. Can newsletter journalists do it again?

In Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, Garrett Graff tells the story of how the web, a technology with the power to fuel democracy became a weapon aimed at the very heart of it. But it wasn’t always this way — in the Internet’s early days, bloggers like Josh Marshall drove tremendous change by challenging traditional media narratives.

During the Iraq War, for example, when the Bush administration tried shaping the story by enacting policies that banned news coverage of military coffins returning home, bloggers like Alex Horton, then an Army infantryman first stationed in Mosul, were reporting what was really happening in the Middle East. “There was this total censorship and this deep unsettling aversion to what was going on, led by the government,” says Horton.

Hear how bloggers fought the power by reporting the truth and how anti-war organizations used the internet to coordinate what is still considered to be the largest protest event in history. While you listen, ask yourself: Can newsletter journalists make it happen again?

Listen to “Establishing Connection,” episode two of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, wherever you get your podcasts.

What do you think are the benefits of people going from big media companies to newsletters? To me, it seems like they can suddenly say whatever they want and don’t have to worry about what the billionaire owner thinks.

I think that is 100% the case. The downside, obviously, is you don’t have that corporate money to do things with, but you do have that independence. It is this sort of paradox that this new publishing world has come about right when it becomes really necessary. It’s almost impossible for a news organization to exist in a legitimate way if it is owned by a big, diversified corporation, just because the news organization is never going to be the profit center. At best, it’s just a break-even proposition.

If you were in a political context, like we are with Trump, the executive can harass a big, diversified corporation. It’s just not workable. That’s why, as we’ve seen, you get ABC News handing a big check to Trump. It’s ironic, but this is why The New York Times doesn’t do that. It sort of sounds crazy to say that they’re an independent publication, but in a basic way, they are.

They’re just The New York Times, right? They don’t have mergers they need approved. They don’t have food and dry goods. They don’t have all these things that other companies do, or these things that are sensitive to regulation. With independent publications, you can basically say, “As long as our subscribers don’t ditch us, we don’t give a fuck.” As long as you have your subscribers, you don’t have to worry about a vibe shift. You don’t have to worry about corporate executives who don’t want to get in trouble with the president.

It’s funny because for a long time, this was one of our big selling points. We’re an independent publication, and independent publications are really important. Starting in like 2024, that became true at a whole new level. It started becoming very clear that you can say things that the big news organizations simply cannot, because they’re too vulnerable.

Lastly, I just want to ask how you’re feeling about the state of journalism right now?

Well, I think journalism is still very embattled, and things continue to be not great, but we do have a lot of good things happening. The reality is that a TPM or a 404 Media or a Bulwark still just have orders of magnitude lower resources than big news organizations. So as much as it’s great to subscribe to them, and those organizations are doing well, in a global sense, you still don’t have the same caliber of resources in journalism in general.

I think it’s still a mixed picture, but there are a lot of exciting things going on, and I think they’re sustainable. I feel pretty bullish about journalism. I recognize that things are still far from ideal, and it’s important to have a diversity of business models. You want people doing a lot of different things, because that’s just a healthy ecosystem. A lot of different kinds of experimentation happening.

Further reading from Josh Marshall:

• “‘Do You Speak Billionaire?’ and Other Stories From the Fall of the Washington Post” (Talking Points Memo, February 5, 2026)

• “The Fight Is Upon Us: What The Right to Vote Looks Like on Trump’s Terrain of Violence” (Talking Points Memo, February 2, 2026)

• “Remembering the Boston Massacre as Minneapolis Writhes Under Occupation” (Talking Points Memo, January 26, 2026)

• “Watch What They’re Doing: Trump Threatens to Make War on the States” (Talking Points Memo, January 16, 2026)

In 2024, independent journalist Frank Shyong decided to leave his post as the youngest and first Asian American Metro columnist at the Los Angeles Times, a role he held since 2019 when he was 31. His departure came at a time when, he says, “journalism about identity and race was seen as a backwater beat.”

But since his exit, Shyong has played up his strengths in reporting, spending this next chapter of his career insisting that stories rooted in Asian American and immigrant life across Southern California are not niche, but essential.

“[At the LA Times,] I quickly learned that I wasn’t always allowed to decide what was interesting and newsworthy about these communities. I, and most other reporters who were not white, were considered biased by default because we sometimes shared a broad demographic category with the people we wrote about,” Shyong wrote in Lunchbox, the Substack newsletter he founded shortly after his departure from the paper.

It’s this insistence on telling these stories with wholeness and nuance that would launch his career to a wider public: “Rosemead,” a feature-length film released in Jan. 2025, was adopted from his 2017 LA Times reporting on the real-life case of Lai Hang, a terminally ill mother who fatally shot her teenage son, George, fearing his untreated schizophrenia would lead him to commit a mass shooting. Starring and produced by Lucy Liu, both the film and reported feature reframe the family tragedy as one done under the banner of shame, stigma, and the crushing pressure faced by Asian American families navigating mental illness — concerns Shyong himself had documented long before Hollywood came calling.

Going independent, with all its unglamorous lessons in marketing, intellectual property, and survival, has become one of Shyong’s ways of arguing that this kind of journalism greatly matters to a readership slowly losing faith in mainline news coverage, perhaps now more than ever. In this edition of Depth Perception, Shyong takes us inside the careful reporting that became a film, the responsibility a journalist has to one’s sources, and what it means to do right by a beat when institutions and audiences are still catching up. — Kelly Kimball

How did you first come across the story of Lai Hang and George?

I was a beat reporter for the San Gabriel Valley for the LA Times. That meant covering about eight out of the 10 majority-Asian communities. There was a very significant Chinese American population, and there are a lot of stories there involving a particular stigma toward mental health care that causes a lot of hidden pain in the community. These are cities where violent crime and gangs have largely been reduced. There was a huge Asian gang enforcement operation in the 1990s that took out a lot of leadership. So in these majority-Asian, majority-immigrant communities, murders are not common. And when they do happen, they often involve really shocking family violence.

This story was just one [that occurred in the San Gabriel Valley.] I went to the courthouse and pulled the file about eight or nine months after [the son’s death] happened. I realized there were a lot of details suggesting a richer story, that this was more than a murder. It involved issues about Asian American families, stigma around trauma, misfortune, and mental health — stories I wanted to tell.

How were you able to harness so much human detail despite the fact it was centered on characters who had already passed?

There were details that hadn’t come out in breaking news: The fact that she was dying, the timing of her decision to kill her son, it made me want to ask more. Through the court files, I located this woman, Ping, who worked at an herbal store. I went to the store and tried to talk to her, explaining what kind of story I wanted to tell. She was the only one who really knew what was going on in the family’s last days. Other relatives weren’t inside the situation. [Ping] carried this secret: that this woman wasn’t just a murderer, but someone trying to be a mother in the best way she knew. Lai Hang was incredibly afraid her son might become a mass shooter. There were details that she was being hurt at home by her son.

I had long conversations with Ping. We met at a McDonald’s in Santa Rosa and talked for hours. To tell this story, I had to explain not just what I wanted to say, but why. Why tell Asian American stories? What does “Asian American” mean to her and to me?

And I think from her immigrant perspective, and from my Asian American perspective, we could both observe the same problem occurring, which is that we think that it’s mercy to allow people to suffer in silence, you know, and we think that suffering and trauma should be endured alone. … This was no great feat of reporting ingenuity. I was just talking to people and asking them, “This is what I think the story is — do you agree? And if so, will you help me tell it?”

Being someone who is Taiwanese American reporting on … various different Asian American immigrant communities, I can see my aunties in all of these women; I can see my father in all of these men. And so I feel a greater responsibility towards them than the newspaper would typically allow. I think if you’re reporting on immigrant communities, you have to understand that they don’t have the context of publicly telling stories like this. They don’t have the context of what it feels like to have your story told in the newspaper. You have to explain [it to] them. You have to say, “Hey, when this story comes out, these are the ways that people might react. This is how your life might be affected.” And a lot of times we really just stay away from those topics because we don’t have control over them … But for me, I just felt it’s far more important to kind of have these conversations up front.

America’s dark history doesn’t repeat — but it does rhyme

In 1942, under the shadow of World War II, the U.S. government invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the forced removal and incarceration of more than 125,000 people of Japanese descent — most of whom were American citizens. The orders from White House uprooted and split families, causing them to abandon their homes, businesses, and communities.

In The Age of Incarceration, an Anthem Award-winning Long Lead feature, photojournalist Morgan Lieberman captures the testimony and experiences of nine of the last survivors of Japanese American incarceration, 80 years after the war ended and these people were released. Reflecting on their experience of a childhood spent in detention, this series of portraits and interviews shares stories not just of injustice, but of resilience, documenting what they endured, what they’ve carried with them the rest of their lives, and what about America’s past their country still hasn’t reckoned with.

Read it today at age-of-incarceration.longlead.com.

What did the adaptation process into a film look like from your perspective?

[The film producers] approached me and we talked on and off for four or five years. During that time, LA Times leadership and IP [intellectual property] policies changed. The paper began asserting ownership over reporters’ IP, especially under Patrick Soon-Shiong with the creation of LA Times Studios, which is sort of like a content arm that he primarily controls.

The filmmakers kept saying, “We want to do it right. We think this is a really, hugely important story to get right.” I pretty much was available to people during the production through phone calls, and I gave feedback on earlier parts of the scripts. I helped connect people to the right experts. And, obviously, [film producer] Mynette Louie did a ton of their own research as well.

Were there moments where you felt protective of the story?

I obviously was incredibly protective of the story. I stayed in touch with [Ping] the entire time and tried to keep her informed and empowered. [Everything in the industry changed throughout] the eight years it took to make this film. This film feels like a unicorn, and it might never happen again, because indie film financing is incredibly difficult. The industry gravitates toward very expensive or very cheap films. … Another part of the learning process was seeing how any film that’s not a Marvel movie has to have a ton of support behind it, and everyone has to pay for it; everyone has to try to make it happen and be very passionate [about it].

You began as the LA Times’ youngest columnist and its first Asian American Metro columnist. You have a lot more experience now. How do you think about doing right by stories now versus then?

At the paper, I was an insurgent inside an institution. Now, as an independent, it’s about creating a product. I can’t brand myself as doing the same work I did as a columnist, because that was about using a [widely-read] platform; [my independent career] is about developing a content niche that people might actually enjoy reading. I’m still a journalist, but I can’t put the city of Los Angeles on my back anymore.

Typically … people don’t want to have to pay for [traditional journalism]. So that type of work, the more traditional journalism, I put that outside the paywall. Stuff that’s personal or opinionated, or an intellectual property bid… like recommendations or guides, [are within the paywall].

Guides is something that I’ve been trying to get into and there’s a lot of potential to smuggle journalism into that format. … [Products like] Lunchbox Atlas, and a column in the form of The Letter [are also] outside the paywall. I’ve experimented with that a lot. Sometimes it’s like a grab bag of things. Sometimes it’s more about traffic, [especially since] your work is on the market.

Further reading from Frank Shyong:

• “A dying mother’s plan: Buy a gun. Rent a hotel room. Kill her son” (LA Times, May 14, 2017)

• “I wrote the true story behind “Rosemead.” Here’s what I learned” (Lunchbox, Dec. 16, 2025)

• “‘Rosemead’ holds up a mirror to our battle against shame” (The Seattle Times, Jan. 6, 2026)

• “Introducing the Lunch Box Atlas: Coffee in Los Angeles” (Lunchbox, Aug. 11, 2025)

• “Tijuana Chinese food, albondigas pho and Mexico’s long history with China” (Lunchbox, Dec. 5, 2024)

For readers new to Venezuela’s political landscape, the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces last month may feel like an out-of-nowhere turning point. But in an email exchange with seasoned Venezuelan journalist Tony Frangie Mawad, he put it more bluntly: Maduro is out, Madurismo remains.

“The removal of Nicolás Maduro is… not a regime collapse,” he said. “The ruling coalition still controls the armed forces, the security services, the courts, the legislature, and the state-owned oil company. That… is what ultimately matters.”

He should know. In 2022, as much of the international press packed up and shifted its focus to other global flashpoints — Ukraine foremost among them — Frangie Mawad returned to his hometown of Caracas after years studying and reporting on Venezuela from the United States.

“I wanted to cover Venezuela… because it was a very particular moment: international interest had clearly declined,” he says. At the time, the interim government strategy under then-acting President Juan Guaidó had failed, the Maduro government had pushed through economic reforms that eased the crisis and brought relative stability, but global attention had shifted elsewhere.

That helps explain Frangie Mawad’s reaction to Maduro’s removal. He cautions against confusing spectacle for structural change, pointing instead to “the governing architecture of Chavismo, built over more than two decades” remaining firmly intact.

Chavismo, which spawned when Hugo Chávez first came to power in 1998 and was inherited by Maduro, began as a democratic socialist experiment, quickly snarled into authoritarianism, and has reached what experts call a “gangster state” end stage. This enduring legacy could explain why Trump has so far supported Venezuela’s transition to the “terrific” Maduro loyalist Delcy Rodríguez, snubbing Nobel Laureate and opposition leader María Corina Machado, who maintains her party won 70% of the popular vote in the country’s July 2024 presidential election.

Frangie Mawad came up “in a world without an ozone layer and with a lot of cyberspace,” his portfolio says. His journalism proliferated after founding his newsletter, Venezuela Weekly, covering everything from tech to climate to culture while contributing hard-hitting analysis and reporting at Politico, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, and others. In this edition of Depth Perception, he imparts decades of lived experience reporting from within and outside the belly of Venezuela’s political machine. — Kelly Kimball

For readers new to Venezuela’s political landscape, how should we see what’s happening in Venezuela right now?

The key point is that this moment is both significant and limited. Significant because it reopens channels — diplomatic, economic, and political — that were frozen. Limited because the same entrenched forces that sustained [Venezuela’s political] system before are still in place, shaping the pace, depth, and direction of any change.

Venezuela now faces a forked path. One route leads towards a “Saudi Arabia of the Caribbean,” an authoritarian but economically functional system, less ideological, energy-aligned with the United States, internationally tolerated, and politically closed at its core. The other points to a Spanish-style transition, like the one that followed the death of General Francisco Franco: slow, negotiated, elite-driven, anchored in gradual liberalization and reforms from within the system for an institutional rebuilding and an eventual democratic horizon.

With the U.S. government now moving to control and sell Venezuelan oil while reportedly planning to exert “maximum leverage” over interim authorities, how do you navigate this terrain in your reporting without amplifying great-power narratives? And while still helping readers understand the impact inside Venezuela and on ordinary people’s lives?

The challenge is to treat U.S. policy neither as omnipotent nor as irrelevant. The fact the [U.S. Department of Justice] is using the opposition’s calls to legitimize their operation in Maduro’s indictment should be proof that Venezuelans not only have agency but that their agency and own constitutional landscape play a major role in the current outcome. Washington’s strategy operates within constraints imposed by Venezuelan institutions and domestic power dynamics.

In reporting, that means grounding geopolitics in observable mechanisms: Who controls production? Who controls cash flow? What conditions are attached to oil sales, and how those decisions translate into real effects like fuel availability, public spending, electricity, wages? It also means resisting simplified frames of “liberation” or “occupation.”

At the end of the day, many foreigners don’t know that throughout much of the 20th century, Venezuela was not only the richest and one of the most democratic countries in the region, but also a long-standing U.S. ally, a relationship that dates back to its independence in the early 19th century. Recent polling cited by local analysts suggests that most Venezuelans support the operation’s outcome and feel more optimistic about the country’s immediate future, despite distrusting the interim leaders. Local economists argue that if Trump succeeds in normalizing the economy, Venezuela could see a surge of foreign currency inflows and growth in the range of 10% to 15%, with spillovers from oil into other sectors and a moderation of rapid currency depreciation and inflation. It was a high-risk bet for the United States, but it seems it will evolve into a rare win-win situation: both for Washington and for Venezuelans.

“It was hailing gas canisters that night.”

Less-lethal munitions come in all shapes and sizes and can leave behind devastating wounds. Often, victims of kinetic-impact projectiles (KIPs) don’t even know what hit them, unless — like Andre Miller of Portland, Oregon — there’s shrapnel left behind.

After being struck in the head by a tear-gas canister launched by federal law enforcement while protesting in 2020, Miller was, in a perverse sense, lucky to have suffered “only” a traumatic brain injury. “​​They were firing canisters at us indiscriminately,” he says. “It was hailing gas canisters that night.”

The People vs. Rubber Bullets is an award-winning multimedia feature that outlines how U.S. law enforcement has improperly used kinetic impact projectiles for more than 50 years. Despite promoting these policing tools as life-saving alternatives to deadly force, the munitions carry a legacy of traumatic brain injuries, blindings, PTSD, and even deaths.

Stay safe out there. Read The People vs. Rubber Bullets today.

What drove you to start a weekly substack newsletter about Venezuela back in Sept. 2022? You intentionally publish both English and Spanish editions, an editorial choice that would seem obvious, but it’s not something many journalists are doing. What can you tell us about that process and those audiences?

I moved back to Venezuela in June of 2022. [By that time] … global attention had shifted elsewhere — especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Many foreign bureaus and correspondents had left Caracas too. So I took advantage of that window and started freelancing for international outlets. What I began to notice was that foreign media were only picking up a very narrow set of Venezuelan stories, mostly those linked to sanctions and energy relations with the U.S. Meanwhile, the local dynamics, which were being reported in rich detail by Venezuelan media, were almost completely ignored abroad.

In 2022 and 2023, for instance, we had several waves of labor protests by public sector workers. That story took forever to trickle out internationally, and when it did, it only appeared in a handful of outlets. Even the opposition primaries didn’t get the attention they deserved. For anyone on the ground, it was obvious that the María Corina Machado phenomenon was taking shape, but that process was kind of underestimated from the outside.

With all that in mind, I launched the Weekly to tell the outside world everything that wasn’t being told and, above all, to translate and build a bridge between that dense, rich, complex local coverage and international audiences.

Then I realized something else: in a context like Venezuela’s — with massive disinformation and censorship, TV channels, and radio stations that say nothing, blocked websites, and a whole ecosystem of pundits trapped in polarization, yellow journalism, and political propaganda — there was a real hunger for good, reliable information through non-blocked channels. And that’s how the Spanish version followed. Venezuela Weekly actually started as a thread in English on Twitter to update people abroad who followed me. It got traction and that’s how it evolved into something more structured.

Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado met with Trump at the White House on Jan 14. How are you thinking about and conveying how Venezuelans themselves feel about Machado right now?

Venezuelans are largely waiting to see the outcome of the meeting, which is widely viewed as consequential. Machado continues to retain sympathy from more than half of the population, according to recent polls. For many local observers, Machado is a charismatic, emotionally driven leader who connects with people in a similar way that Hugo Chávez, her original archnemesis, once did. While much of the discussion abroad has focused on her relationship with figures such as Trump — or, especially in the past, Israel — inside Venezuela she is largely respected for having revitalized a demoralized opposition [and clinched] a landslide victory at the 2023 opposition primaries.

So why is Machado close to figures with disputable democratic records? The current context, and the limited agency available to the opposition and civil society inside Venezuela, have pushed Machado toward uncomfortable and highly pragmatic alliances as a way to achieve a transition and oust the regime. Political transitions often involve such trade-offs. Nelson Mandela, for instance, also received support from regimes with poor human rights records, including the Soviet Union and Cuba, without that diminishing either his leadership or the legitimacy of the Nobel Prize he later received. Machado’s position today is comparable.

She is likely to continue playing a significant role in the current process, because she remains the symbol of a democratic outcome. Her meeting with Trump, and her bipartisan backing — particularly among Republicans and figures such as Marco Rubio — are likely to reinforce that role.

Further reading from Tony Frangie Mawad:

• “What I Saw in Venezuela After Trump Seized Maduro” (Politico, Jan. 11, 2026)

• “Anxious but hopeful Venezuelans wait for economy to hit the gas” (The Globe and Mail, Jan. 15, 2026)

• “Under the threat of a U.S. invasion, Venezuelans try to carry on with their daily lives” (The Globe and Mail, Dec. 17, 2025)

• “Against all odds: the surprising rise of Venezuela’s tech ecosystem” (Wired, Nov. 12, 2025)

• “Venezuela’s Strongman Could Actually Lose” (Foreign Policy, July 19, 2024)

When Laura Jedeed attended an ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) recruitment expo in Texas in August 2025, she figured her application would be dead on arrival. After all, it takes about five seconds of Googling to find her bylines criticizing the Trump administration, her social media posts condemning ICE, or her dossier on AntifaWatch, the right-wing website that tracks supposed members of the “domestic terror organization.” She went anyway, curious about the hiring process and confident that even the most cursory background check would show her the door.

Instead, they offered her a job.

Jedeed, 38, is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn who covers America far-right extremism for outlets including Rolling Stone, the New Republic, Politico, and her own newsletter Firewalled Media. Her path to journalism was circuitous: She enlisted in the Army at 18 as a signals intelligence collector and analyst, deployed twice to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne Division, then cycled through startup work and bartending before landing at Reed College and eventually NYU’s Literary Reportage program. Her 2024 Rolling Stone feature on the rise and fall of Project Veritas — reported over two years while attending the organization’s parties and touring its offices — established her as a reporter willing to get close to even her most challenging subjects.

The ICE story, published in Slate earlier this month, has turned into something bigger. After the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) called her reporting “a lazy lie,” Jedeed responded with video evidence from the agency’s own portal, sparking a national conversation about who exactly is being armed and sent into America’s streets.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Jedeed about the journey from growing up watching a lot of Fox News to becoming an anti-fascist journalist, and why she didn’t accept ICE’s job offer. —Parker Molloy

Why did you become a journalist?

I like a few things. I like writing, I’m a politics junkie, and I like adrenaline. And the kind of journalism I do combines all three in a way that I find very, very fun.

At age 18, you enlisted as a signals intelligence collector and analyst, then deployed twice to Afghanistan with the 82nd Airborne. What drew you to that work at that age?

I grew up in a family that voted Republican. I watched a lot of Fox News as a kid, and I really, truly believed that we were fighting to keep Americans safe at home — that we were bringing freedom and democracy to people who wanted it. And I wanted to be part of that.

So I joined, and it took until I deployed to Afghanistan a few years later to realize that wasn’t true. We were not in any way fighting for any of those things. We were, in fact, just telling people what to do who really didn’t want to be told what to do. And I don’t like being told what to do, so I find that very relatable. I was like, “What else have I been lied to about?” And that’s honestly what led me to where I am today.

You mentioned in the ICE piece that Afghanistan “beat out” the appeal of that warrior mentality. Can you talk more about that shift?

There are two instances that really stood out to me. The first is right after my first deployment. I joined late — I had just gotten to the unit, and they were already deployed, so I was going to join them. They’d been there for about a year. And as I was beginning to do the work, it became very clear very quickly that tribal structure was really important in Afghanistan, and that if I was going to do analysis that was good, I would need to understand it. So I asked, “Hey, does anybody have a PDF or a PowerPoint about the tribal structures? I’d like to get up to speed.” And they’re like, “Oh, no, we don’t. Maybe we could find one?”

So they go looking, and eventually they do find one that they hadn’t been reading. It was a 12-page PDF that was basically like, “Here’s the basics, but we don’t really know.” And I thought, in what way are we bringing freedom and democracy to people if you don’t even know who they are [or] what they believe?

The second thing was during my second deployment. One of the things I did was go through the phones of people who were detained. They would give me the phone — I didn’t know anything else about them — and I’d go through, see if there was anything suspicious. Maybe once or twice there was something, but in the vast majority of cases, it was just mostly Bollywood videos. I don’t know what happened to these people, but nothing good. It was just very humanizing.

There was a lot, but those are the two things that really stand out. I was like, “This is wrong. We’re doing something wrong here.”

“Who brings guns to a protest?”

In the wake of the January 24 shooting death of Minneapolis ICU nurse Alex Pretti by ICE agents, many influential leaders — including President Trump, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, U.S. Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Greg Bovino, and FBI director Kash Patel — blamed the victim, saying he should not have brought a gun to a protest. (Note: Bovino repeatedly called it a riot, though an unlawful assembly was only declared after the shooting.)

While Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust tells the story of the uniquely American problem of gun violence, the finale of Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right recaps a black mirror-version of last weekend’s tragic events. In 2020, President Trump tweeted “Liberate Minnesota” and urged people to “save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” spurring armed protestors to turn out at anti-lockdown protests. After that, armed militiamen went on to push their way into Michigan’s capital, law enforcement did not fire upon them, and only one person was arrested. Following that, armed people began showing up at demonstrations around the country, including Trump’s own speech at the Ellipse on January 6.

At the close of that season, back in 2023, host Garrett Graff noted “We are at a very pivotal point in our country.” We now live in the long shadow of that moment. Learn more about how we got here by listening to Long Shadow, wherever you get your podcasts.

Your path from military to journalism took some turns — analyst at a startup, bartender, Reed College, NYU’s Literary Reportage program. Was there a moment when journalism clicked as the thing you were actually supposed to be doing?

It was something I kind of wanted to do, and I was kind of trying to do it. I didn’t really know how. Right out of Reed College, I wasn’t really sure how to get into it. And then COVID hit, and I was in Portland, Oregon at the time. When the [Black Lives Matter] protests started, I went as an activist in the beginning for all the reasons you would expect.

About a couple weeks in, the PPB — the Portland Police — started really messing up journalists. They started targeting them and a lot of papers pulled out their coverage for insurance reasons. The reaction from the activist community was, “Okay, well, we’ll do it then.” So I started to live-tweet the protests. And I really enjoyed it. I got traction. At a certain point after a couple of weeks, I was like, “You know what? This is what I want to be doing.” So I pulled back from the activism. I didn’t participate. I watched and wrote about it, while making my sympathies very clear. But it felt so right, and I enjoyed it so much. And people seemed to like it too. I was like, “Maybe I could do this.”

Walk me through the decision to attend that ICE recruitment expo in the first place. What were you expecting versus what you found?

The expectation was I just wanted to see what the recruitment process was like. As soon as I heard about the event, I thought, “Oh my God, this is such an interesting opportunity to see who’s applying and what the application process is like.” I felt like with my résumé, I was in a unique position to do this, because at first glance, my résumé looks pretty good to them — especially if it’s a skills-based résumé where I don’t really talk about the last seven years.

So I pitched it to Slate. They liked the idea. I’d go, and I would just talk about [my] experience. And then eventually [the recruiters] would look up my name, which is very Googleable, and be like, “Oh, this isn’t who we’re looking for.” That’s what was supposed to happen. That’s not, of course, what happened. A bunch of things ended up happening and ultimately culminated in a final offer they said I’d accepted and an EOD — entry on duty — date, despite not filling out any paperwork and probably failing the drug test.

You wrote that you figured even the most cursory background check would disqualify you. When the email came offering you the job anyway, what went through your mind?

That’s the thing — I didn’t see the tentative offer. I wasn’t looking for it because I wasn’t expecting it, and it was later than they said it would be. So it went to the bottom of my inbox. I didn’t realize I was under consideration until I got the email about a drug test a few weeks later. I was like, “Yeah, OK, sure. I’ll waste their money. Why not?”

From there, I was expecting to hear back because I was expecting to fail, and they have to tell you when you fail, is my understanding. But when I didn’t hear back, I was like, “I guess I could just get on the portal and see what’s going on.” And that’s when I found the thing about the final offer and my EOD date, and I was just like, “What? What is happening?”

After the piece ran, DHS publicly called your reporting “a lazy lie,” claiming you were never actually offered a job. You responded with video evidence proving otherwise. What was it like to have a federal agency attempt to discredit your reporting in real time, and what does it say that they were so confident no one would check?

As soon as I saw it, I was overjoyed, because I knew that this would make more people read the article, and I had the receipts, so this was the perfect opportunity to drop them. And for the very online people, I ended up ratioing them into the ground, and I didn’t know how much I’d wanted to do that. It was the most satisfying moment of my online life.

You had the receipts ready to go when DHS pushed back. Is that level of documentation something you’ve always done, or has covering this beat taught you to be more vigilant about protecting yourself?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I wouldn’t expect anyone to take my word on this. This is a crazy story, so yeah, you’ve got to be able to prove it.

There’s a moment in the piece where you describe hitting “decline” instead of “accept,” and you’re candid that self-preservation won out over potentially writing “the story of a lifetime.” How did you weigh that decision?

It took a while, and I’m still not entirely sure I made the right choice. I’ll probably never really know. But honestly, I had a friend a few days before absolutely read me the riot act about, “You can’t do this. They will get you.” It was in my mind, and it really was just — I don’t know if this is what I want my end to be. The reward would be incredible, but at this time, I think maybe I want to be sure that I’m around to write more things.

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

“I have a duty to share what I saw.” Jacob Soboroff on his role in Trump immigration documentary 'Separated'

There are many horrible facts laid out in Academy Award–winning director Errol Morris’s Separated — a powerful new documentary about the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border — not least of which is that more than 1,300 kids have yet to be reunited with…

Read more

a year ago · 2665 likes · 100 comments · Mark Yarm and Long Lead

The piece ends with Renee Good’s killing, which made it all the more timely. ICE has been committing atrocities the whole time, but this one really caught the entire nation’s attention. How do you think about connecting your reporting on institutional failures to these very immediate human costs?

I think the Renee Good [killing] is powerful for a lot of reasons, but one of the things I don’t hear talked about enough is that Jonathan Ross was not a new hire. He’s got almost a decade in service. Democrats tend to only care about ICE when Republicans are in charge. There were horrific abuses under the Biden administration. It’s worse now by orders of magnitude, but it’s always been bad.

What I would hope is that the more stories like this one come out, the more maybe we can realize that ICE is not a normal institution that’s got some problems. There is something deeply wrong with this institution, which is barely 20 years old. It’s not like this is some kind of storied institution in our government. Why do we have this? This cannot be reformed. It’s got to go.

Covering the far right as a beat requires getting close to people and movements you find genuinely alarming. How do you manage that psychologically?

I feel like it’s a calling, not to be overly dramatic. I remember believing a lot of things I don’t believe anymore. And I remember believing them because I thought they were right. I wasn’t malevolent. I didn’t hate poor people. I just thought some really wrong things. I thought bootstraps worked, and that’s just one example.

I want to try to communicate that to people, and that work has gotten a lot harder as things have gotten worse. But I really try to approach it from wanting people to understand why these people think what they do, and then explain why it’s wrong.

Your AntifaWatch dossier comes up in the piece almost as a punchline, but there’s real risk in being publicly identified by these groups. How has that affected how you move through the world?

I actually got doxxed when I was in Portland. My home address was published. I had some very threatening messages. Someone threatened to pay my parents a visit. That was really very scary.

So I’ve taken a lot of precautions since then. I have one of those services that scrubs my address from the internet. I have a PO box. I’m very careful. My grandmother’s obituary — I had them remove my name from that. My family did not understand, and they were upset, but I insisted because this is for them. You take precautions, and then you just go forward. You can’t let that rule your life.

We also like to ask a string of what we call “Leading Questions” — boilerplate questions that journalists have interest answers to. The first: What story of yours are you proudest of?

I did a very large feature for Rolling Stone about the rise and fall of Project Veritas, that organization that does those gotcha videos. They took down ACORN [the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now]. James O’Keefe was in charge of it and then was booted for reasons that are legit, as I go into in the article.

I’m proud of it because it took — I hung out with those guys for like two years. Not regularly, but I went to their parties. I toured their office. It took a lot of legwork. I visited one of them in Miami. We spent a couple of days talking about everything that happened. Rapport building was huge in that one. And I’m very proud I was able to write an article that I completely stand behind, that I think is fair and honest and holds them to account. And they weren’t angry enough to “gotcha” me. I didn’t get stung. So I’m very proud of that.

What story of yours do you most regret?

This is a minor thing, but I wrote an article about CPAC a few years ago. There was this guy who did this kind of art piece — I don’t know if he’d call it that. He was in a cell and he was crying, and it was supposed to represent the January 6 defendants. I really wanted to communicate his side of it. The article was supposed to have that in it. I wanted to communicate how seriously he took it and why he felt that way and how he believed that some people just got swept up in the moment and regretted it later.

I didn’t do it well. I don’t think I humanized him enough. He was very upset. That’s fine — I don’t care if he’s upset. But I’m upset with me that I didn’t do better. That was early in my career. I’ve learned a lot since then.

What’s the best journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?

This is a weird one, but I had a friend who wasn’t even a journalist tell me, “You’re too proud. You need to stop being so damn proud. Ask people for things. Go out there, ask editors for things you don’t think they’ll give you. Stop being scared of rejection.”

At the beginning, journalism is just rejection. It’s radio silence, and then sometimes you get a rejection letter, and that’s an amazing day because someone actually read your pitch. To make it in this industry, you really have to just get used to that. And I wasn’t doing a good job. That was really, really good advice.

What is a widely accepted journalistic rule or norm that you disagree with?

I’ll do two. I think some of the stuff around undercover journalism is messed up. There are some rules about disclosure that don’t always make sense, especially in our world. I believe in being as honest as you can be, but for example, in this ICE piece, if I’d gone in and said, “I’m a journalist and I want to know about this process,” they would have said, “Get out.” I think this was an important enough story to go in and do it the way I did.

The second one is that I think interviews are overrated. They’re good, but I don’t think every story needs a quote. Sometimes it’s actually detrimental. For example, if you’re writing about some abuse by DHS and you want to get a quote and they just say, “That’s not true,” but you know they’re lying — I don’t know if that’s really useful. Or if you’re at an event and you go up to someone as a journalist, and now you’re interacting with them as a journalist instead of just observing. Sometimes “here’s what the person next to me said” feels more authentic.

What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism, if anything?

Independent media, honestly. I think that’s the future. The legacy media is crumbling. The money is not there. It’s getting worse all the time. There are people who are really good that are still in it, but I think we’re seeing the rise of stuff like Substack. It’s not ideal — we have a thing where everyone’s paying $5 to a lot of people, and that’s not ideal. But I think it’s going to evolve over time into something that’s actually sustainable. I hope so.

Further reading from Laura Jedeed:

• “You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse. I’m the Proof.” (Slate, Jan. 13, 2026)

• “Mahmoud Khalil Is the First Activist to Be Disappeared by Trump” (The Nation, March 11, 2025)

• “The ‘Moderates’ Who Want to Push San Francisco Right” (The New Republic, Nov. 4, 2024)

• “Where MAGA Granddads and Resistance Moms Go to Learn America’s Most Painful History Lessons” (Politico, Aug. 31, 2024)

• “Inside the Rise and Fall of Project Veritas” (Rolling Stone, June 20, 2024)

News, as unbelievable as it’s been lately, is moving faster than ever. In early September, the United States military struck a Venezuelan boat suspected of drug trafficking and killed 11 people in Caribbean waters. Months of subsequent leaks revealed dozens of other vessels were also targeted, killing more than 100 other people. In early January, the U.S. special forces snatched Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas and brought him to New York City to face federal narco-terrorism charges. Days later, Minneapolis erupted after a U.S. ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old mother Renee Good. As if that wasn’t enough, President Trump meanwhile declared his ambition to take over Greenland, posing the biggest threat to NATO in its 76-year history.

This dizzying turn of events unfurled both on video and in print, giving people the ability to weigh the value of one medium versus the other. How did reading about Good’s shooting inform people compared to seeing the many viral videos that captured the moment online? Did the boat strike videos tell the story better, or did the reporting on them? What encapsulates confusion over Greenland more clearly, opinion columns or interviews with Inuit fishermen?

For nearly 25 years, Ben Anderson — journalist, war correspondent, author, television reporter, and documentarian — has risked his life toggling between print and film in his pursuit of truth in some of the world’s most dangerous war zones. While Anderson struggled to break into journalism as a writer, a transition to filmmaking launched his award-winning career. Ironically, his filmmaking success allowed him to return to his first love: conducting journalism in print. With the swirl of baffling geopolitical events over the last few months, Anderson seems uniquely qualified to assess the advantages and dangers of these events mediated by video and text.

In 2003, Anderson created Holidays In the Danger Zone for BBC Four, a television series he hosted that explored six countries referenced in former U.S. President George W. Bush’s notorious “axis of evil” speech: Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Syria, Libya, and Cuba. Anderson continued the series by covering other global conflicts and atrocities, from modern slavery in Dubai to gang wars in El Salvador. In 2007, Anderson released “Taking on the Taliban,” a film based on two months covering Afghanistan’s most violent province, Helmand, with the British Grenadier Guards. Six years later, Anderson was hired by Vice News as an on-air correspondent.

As Anderson’s TV and documentary career flourished, he filed reports for publications like The Times, Esquire, GQ, and the London Review of Books. In 2011, he published “No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan.”

Anderson speaks with Depth Perception about his experiences covering many foreign conflicts in print, TV, and film, as well as the advantages of each medium. —Brin-Jonathan Butler

The first widely reported U.S. military strike on a boat coming from Venezuela took place on Sept. 2, 2025. All 11 people aboard the vessel were killed on the pretext they were “narco-terrorists.” Four months later, Maduro was captured by U.S. forces and transported to New York to face federal charges. How have you interpreted this situation?

The only video of the strike that exists is the U.S. government’s video. So no one can report it effectively unless they get access to the full video. As for the broader Venezuela situation, I remember the first time I went to Venezuela and covered the protests in 2017 for Vice.

You can make all kinds of arguments for or against Maduro. You can make all kinds of arguments about what the U.S. has done in the past to, not just Venezuela, but Latin America as a whole. But it was very clear that the vast majority of people in the streets — in Caracas and elsewhere — hated the regime. They accused them of massive corruption, getting rich through drug trafficking, torture, imprisonment, and the violent crushing of any kind of dissent. It was very clear the vast majority of people felt that way.

It’s very easy for me to say I think U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America has mostly been awful for the last five decades. But it’s also true that Maduro is not a good guy, spectacularly corrupt, and that anyone suspected of dissent could well get nabbed off the streets and be tortured and maybe never seen again. It was very easy to figure out that was the truth after just a few days on the ground there.

Was there a kind of “gateway drug” related to war coverage that suggested it might be a calling for you?

Reading about British support for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was the first one. As a teenager, I read about Palestine, Congo, Iraq, and other places and just thought, “Why is everyone not talking about this massive international story with tens or hundreds of thousands of people suffering? Why is no one talking about the fact that my government seems to be supporting the wrong side in almost every single case?” It was shocking to me to discover that as a teenager. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t the lead item every night on the news and wasn’t on the front page of every single newspaper.

Long Lead presents: “An Unnatural Disaster”

One of the world’s newest cities, Canaan emerged from the rubble of an apocalyptic earthquake and the long, slow collapse of Haiti’s government. Now, on the edge of survival, its citizens are trapped, fighting to reclaim their lives. In the Long Lead feature “An Unnatural Disaster,” journalist Jacob Kushner follows this group, desperate to save their country, as they build a new city from nothing. Brought to life by dozens of photos by Allison Shelley, the piece reflects Haiti’s beauty and chaos, the hope of its people, and the dire straits of their plight.

Winner of the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for Fact Checking and shortlisted for both the One World Media Print Award and the 2025 True Story Award, “An Unnatural Disaster” is free to read at Long Lead.

When you look at a situation like potential regime change in Venezuela — given you’re someone who has covered Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, Guantanamo Bay, Gaza, Syria, on and on — how big a discrepancy is there between what you see on the ground and how the media depicts those situations to the public, in your experience?

It varies from conflict to conflict. In Afghanistan, when I first went there, I think I was one of the first ones to get to Helmand province in the south and really spend weeks on end with the British troops. The narrative at home was that the British are great at peacekeeping because of their experience in Northern Ireland. But I think most people would say, “Hang on a minute. Northern Ireland wasn’t good.” There was footage of them handing out lollipops to kids. I went out there and there were firefights lasting days. Bombs were dropping on buildings full of Taliban fighters a few hundred meters away from British soldiers who were running out of ammo and collapsing from heat exhaustion. That’s what really got my blood going as a reporter.

I kept going back and I did films about how the police force that [the British government was] funding and arming and training were pedophiles and drug addicts and criminals. That caused a bit of a stink. But the narrative remained that the Taliban were almost finished and we were backing the good guys. I kept thinking, “Am I stupid? Am I missing something here? Because it’s so clear the opposite is true.” I even wrote in my book that I didn’t think the government would stand for 24 hours after we left, which is pretty much what happened. So in the case of Afghanistan, it was very much the opposite of what we were being told.

You wanted a career as a writer, but what was the calculus for you choosing to mostly cover conflict in documentary form for television and film rather than as a writer?

I was trying to be a writer and I was writing articles. Obviously I couldn’t afford to go anywhere or travel anywhere and I got a couple rejections. Mostly I got no reply whatsoever because the articles were probably terrible.

Then a friend of a friend said someone needs someone to go undercover to expose the massive corruption in the funeral business. They said I’d be really good at it based on the kinds of things I’d done in my life. Basically, I was able to get dodgy characters to talk about dodgy things quite quickly and easily and if I got into a difficult position, I was able to talk my way out of it quite well. That was my entire CV that got me that job and I started watching documentaries.

There was a great [documentary] by Sean Langan called “Tea with the Taliban.” He just wandered around Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. This was the late 90s. There’s one scene I really remember where he’s filming with a tiny handheld camcorder. And he pulls up to a Taliban checkpoint and he’s told, “Put the camera down! Put the camera down! Taking images of the human face is forbidden.” But he doesn’t put the camera down. They approach him aggressively. He flips the screen over on his camcorder so they can see themselves. They all suddenly smile and remark how Allah made them so handsome. They start stroking their beards and mocking how one beard is more impressive than the other guy’s beard. And then he has tea with them and hangs out with them and they end up chatting for a while.

That tiny little thing alone made me think, “I don’t know if I can do that as a writer but as a documentary filmmaker? Maybe I’ve got a much [better] chance of success,” because, you know, my only real skills at that point were a bit of bravery, a bit of endurance, and almost foolhardy curiosity. It really wasn’t going to take me anywhere as a writer at that point. But as a documentary maker — certainly an undercover documentary maker initially — and then covering foreign conflict, it could get me a long way.

Somewhere you were interviewed, you said a conflict you covered on film was seen by millions, while the book you wrote about the same place sold something like 10,000 copies by comparison. Should that marketplace reality frighten us about the role of how journalism is metabolized by the culture?

My book about covering Afghanistan, “No Worse Enemy” — with over 10 years of reporting, none of it opinion, all close-up eye witness testimony of the war falling apart — it’s sold maybe 16,000 [copies] by now. One documentary I did completely alone with a handheld camera, self-funded, ended up being on the BBC and Vice — and with YouTube also — it had over 20 million views.

So in terms of impact? I respect books far more than I respect documentaries. If you read a book properly, it can stay with you forever and change your life like very few documentaries or films. But in terms of making a living and how many people will be exposed to your work? Especially non-fiction work about the failing war in Afghanistan. There’s just not that many people that are going to read it. And if 16,000 [people] bought my book, how many even ended up reading it? The attention span just isn’t there anymore.

Also if I was just doing the book, there’s no way I could have funded, I think it was, 16 trips I took to Afghanistan in the end. A book advance might have afforded one trip. A really good advance, maybe a few more. But TV could fund that. In terms of the written word, I think it’s actually worse than what we’re talking about. I don’t know how many people even read full articles on a regular basis nowadays, let alone books.

With the ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minnesota, even before an investigation, prominent members of the administration were labeling her a “domestic terrorist” to defend the action. Since last September, there have been over 100 deaths attributed to U.S. military strikes to alleged drug-smuggling vessels with the people killed deemed “narco-terrorists.” A large portion of the U.S. supports these designations while an even larger portion rejects it. How do you see this increasing inability for the country to agree on what reality is anymore in so many situations.

There has to be some kind of device, I don’t know what it is, where basic facts can be agreed upon. I know everyone says we’re in a post-truth world and there are two completely separate universes. I agree that we’re there and I don’t know how we get back.

All these boats taken out weren’t even carrying fentanyl. Hardly any of them were headed to the United States either. Even the most simple basic facts like this are completely missed in most of the debates and in the coverage of these topics. It’s very frightening. There was a poll a little while ago that said, something to the effect of 49% of Americans thought that Palestinians were occupying Israeli land. Not the other way around.

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

Human stories from Ukraine: Inside The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak

When Tim Mak landed in Kyiv on Feb. 23, 2022, for what he thought would be routine coverage of a potential conflict, he couldn't have known that Russian tanks would roll across the border that very night. But those events launched the former NPR investigative correspondent and U.S. Army combat medic on an unexpected journey — one t…

Read more

a year ago · 11 likes · Parker Molloy and Long Lead

I wondered what you made of Sean Penn being hired by Rolling Stone in 2016 to report on and interview El Chapo. Do you think we’ll see more of this kind of celebrity journalist parachuting into big stories to gain more readers? A kind of celebrity journalism-reality TV model?

Oh I think we’re there already. I used to work at the BBC and I was always amazed that the BBC would have correspondents based in countries all over the world. But whenever something major happened that became major news that everyone was talking about? They’d send their famous reporter over to that country. And I thought, “but surely this is exactly the moment when you lean on the person that’s been there for years and knows everything and knows everyone there?” So I think, in a way, it’s been happening forever.

There was a famous moment where Shane Smith of Vice was at The New York Times offices talking to David Carr and bragging about how Vice was able to reach young people in a way that legacy media was failing hopelessly. Vice News was once valued at $5.7 billion and went bankrupt in 2023.

Obviously Shane got all kinds of things badly wrong, and I do wish he’d have done certain things differently so that we’d still be doing what we did today. But the one thing I think he got right was he said “young” people. Is a 65-year-old in a blazer telling young viewers what’s happening and lecturing them as effective at reaching them as showing real footage from places? That’s what I and a lot of my colleagues at Vice actually did. It wasn’t us standing there telling you. It was actually showing you things happening.

My goal was always to spend as much time as I could to maximize my chances of being there at the right time and actually capturing events. For example, we captured Saudi airstrikes on a wedding that killed like 30-35 civilians. It showed exactly what the U.S.-backed Saudi bombing campaign against Yemen was doing and what it was like.

Young people watched it in droves. The first Afghanistan film I did for Vice was 85 minutes long and it was largely about a corrupt police force. They were pedophiles. You would have thought no one would want to watch that. It’s had 20 to 25 million views on YouTube and Vice News combined.

I think there is an appetite if this work is done right. Young people are gobbling up all the footage they’re seeing from Gaza. Hopefully they’re also going off and picking up a few books by writers who’ve been covering these conflicts for years and years. The appetite is there for difficult subjects and to engage with them.

Further viewing and reading from Ben Anderson:

• Holidays in the Danger Zone (BBC Four, 2003-2006)

• “No Worse Enemy” (Oneworld, 2013)

• Mission Accomplished? The Secret of Helmand (Panorama, 2013)

• This is What Winning Looks Like (Vice, 2013)

• The Interpreters (Vice, 2014)

After making films for more than half a century, Ken Burns has become an institution as much as a documentarian. The 72-year-old’s latest film for PBS, “The American Revolution,” is a six-part, 12-hour-long series chronicling a war Burns calls “more of a civil war than our Civil War.” From all the subjects he’s covered — the Vietnam War, baseball, World War II, jazz, the Prohibition period, Jack Johnson, and so many more — Burns says his latest is “foundational.”

Before embarking on this project, Burns and his team of co-directors (Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt) and screenwriter Geoffrey C. Ward spent a decade interviewing leading scholars, scouring historical materials, and researching thousands of books. Burns assembled a cast that he believes might be the greatest ever assembled for any film project: Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Laura Linney, Claire Danes, Kenneth Branagh, Jeff Daniels, Samuel L. Jackson, Edward Norton, and Liev Schreiber, among a raft of other A-list talent.

The innovative and dazzling cartography used in bringing the dimension and scale of “The American Revolution” to life required more maps being used in this film than all his previous work combined. Burns’ work on “The American Revolution” spanned the presidencies of Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump’s second term. Throughout the 12 hours, far from the turbulent material feeling anachronistic, the present-day parallels are almost disturbingly constant and numerous.

Depth Perception speaks with Ken Burns about the process of creating his latest project for over a decade and why cataloging the past is critical for understanding the present. —Brin-Jonathan Butler

About nine hours into your new series, “The American Revolution” plowed into where I live in Connecticut. The Battle of Norwalk —

If we can even call it a battle (laughs). The British basically attacked and burned down Norwalk, along with Fairfield and New Haven, I think.

This is why I thought you might find the point interesting. About a mile from where I live, my mother-in-law grew up on Strawberry Hill Avenue, in a house built in 1705. Her basement was connected to the underground railroad. But in 1779, General Tryon and his troops were burning down nearly all of East Norwalk. The only reason my mother-in-law’s home still stands is because, from the upstairs window of the house, a hopping mad wife was repelling British troops on her own with a shotgun while her husband was out fighting them with a militia. It’s one of the only houses in the neighborhood that remains from that time.

The Revolutionary War is the story of us, right? It’s the story of a divided America — always has been. In some ways our revolution is more of a civil war than our Civil War was.

You’ve said of this film that you won’t work on a more important film. Can you elaborate on what makes you say that?

It’s actually been misquoted. It’s slightly different from what you said and I think you’ll immediately make the distinction. I said first about our film on the Holocaust, which came out in 2022, that I won’t work on a more important film. I told it to the world and I meant it. But the important word is more. I hope that there have been five or six films, you know, about the Civil War, baseball, jazz, Roosevelt, World War II, Vietnam — which are as important.

This current film was our origin story and we kind of make it bloodless and gallant and superficial. We focus on really good things — guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts. That’s a really huge part of it, but it’s not the only part.

What were some of the biggest surprises that came up during the decade that you worked on this project?

Every single day. Every day it was like everything stood out and nothing. Everything was a surprise. I mean, that’s what happened. The response since it was first broadcast and streamed in mid-November has been, “Wow. I had no idea.” And I think that’s because for the last 10 years, I had been going, “Wow. I had no idea.”

A lot of it has to do with the violence. This was a revolution and a very bloody one. It is also a very bloody civil war. And it’s also a global war that has a lot of partners involved in it.

In my editing room, we have a neon sign that says, “It’s complicated.” Human events are complicated. It’s important to find out new and destabilizing information. Facts outweigh story and artistic considerations. We’ve always rolled that way.

Listen to the “Long Shadow” of American history

Through a series of riveting, complex narratives, Long Lead’s podcast Long Shadow makes sense of what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history, including Waco, Columbine, Y2K, 9/11, COVID-19, January 6, and beyond.

Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist historian, author, and journalist Garrett Graff, this Peabody-nominated podcast has been called “rigorous, authoritative, and an electrifying listen” by the Financial Times and honored as one of the year’s best podcasts by The Atlantic, Audible, Mashable, Rolling Stone, and The Week.

A winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award and the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award, Long Shadow has also been honored with eight Signal Awards, including for Best History, Best Documentary, Best Technology, and Best Activism, Public Service, & Social Impact Podcast. The podcast’s second season has been added to the history program at the University of Houston and the third season has been integrated into Harvard Law School’s curriculum on the Second Amendment.

Looking for another revolution? Listen to Long Shadow wherever you get your podcasts.

Encountering George Washington mandating vaccines for his troops and many other moments from the war that echo with friction in today’s cultural and political landscape in America, I wondered how you sought to handle presenting them?

We’re never explicit. In fact, we have a law against that. I’ve taken stuff out because if I left them in, you wouldn’t believe me that I didn’t.

Mark Twain was supposed to have said that history doesn’t repeat itself. Which, of course, it doesn’t. No event has happened twice, he said, but it rhymes. I’ve spent my entire professional life seeing those rhymes.

In this series there’s an invasion of Canada. There’s a continent-wide pandemic that kills more people than the revolution. There is a debate over inoculation. There is just rhyme after rhyme after rhyme. But this is human nature. These things occur and reoccur continually and our job is to not build neon signs with big arrows that demand you to look at how much it reminds you of today.

You’ve called the cast of actors you assembled for “The American Revolution” one of the best casts there’s ever been for a film.

“The Longest Day”’s cast had every major male actor in Britain, Germany, America, and France, right? I think our film is longer. We didn’t have any photographs, obviously. No newsreels. Out of necessity — all of my films, thanks to PBS, are essentially director’s cuts.

I wrote an article about a woman who stole — her word — J.D. Salinger’s voice on a recorder. Betty Eppes went to Cornish, New Hampshire and interviewed Salinger in 1980 as a journalist looking for an interview. She secretly recorded him. Since Salinger died in 2010, there has never been a recording of his voice produced to the public. Eppes told me she was offered over $500,000 to sell the tape by a wealthy business man. So my question for you is, what is the actual value for people to know how George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Ben Franklin actually sounded?

Let’s start with Abraham Lincoln. Because we know a lot about how he sounded and it’s thin and reedy and it’s nasally. He could reach people without amplification. So when he gave the Gettysburg Address, he’s got everybody. When he gives the inaugural, he has many, many more people. And yet the most important thing you want to carry is the meaning of the words.

Did George Washington have a southern accent? We don’t know. Does he have an English accent? We don’t know. When Vivien Leigh played Scarlett O’Hara, it wasn’t a big stretch to go from an English accent to a southern accent because that’s the sort of aristocracy of linguistics there, right?

You’ve been making films for the last 54 years. You’ve worked with some of the best actors alive during that time. Hundreds of them. In hindsight, have you ever sought an actor who was a disastrous choice for a role you wanted them to play? Did William Shatner or Christopher Walken or Joe Pesci ever step up to the microphone —

It’s funny, I just wrote down Christopher Walken. He’s got such a great voice. He’s amazing. I met him years and years ago. But yes, there have been a few people, who will remain completely nameless, who just couldn’t get it. They didn’t know how to do that voice. They’re either chewing up the scenery or projecting too much. Whatever it might be. I blame myself for it not working out. And some of them were really, really famous actors. Really good actors. Well known and respected. It didn’t work out (laughing).

I read that after your latest promotional tour for “The American Revolution,” you speculated that of the 340 or so million podcasts floating around, you’ve sat down for half of them to discuss this film.

I’ve never actually listened to any of them. So I don’t really know what the effect is. I’m always assured by a publicist that this or that podcast has millions of listeners or whatever it is, but I always end up feeling like maybe I’m talking to the person and two or three people end up listening to them. It’s just a lot of conversions. Not that many films of mine ago, there weren’t any podcasts we did, right? Maybe one or two.

Has there ever been a dream project for you that just wasn’t tenable to pursue?

I don’t think so. I’ve never started a project really in earnest and had to abandon it. There are always challenges to any project obviously. But we’ve made all the films that we’ve started to make.

Further viewing from Ken Burns:

• “The Civil War” (PBS, 1990)

• “Baseball” (PBS, 1994)

• “Jazz” (PBS, 2001)

• “Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson” (PBS, 2004)

• “Prohibition” (PBS, 2011)

Ryan Broderick — the editor-in-chief of Garbage Day, the premier newsletter dedicated to internet culture — cut his teeth during the MySpace era. “The first stories I was pitching around in college to different blogs were explaining MySpace drama, and I feel like I’ve had a foot in that world ever since,” he tells Depth Perception. “Now the whole world is engulfed by internet stuff, so the beat has only gotten bigger and wider.”

Broderick launched Garbage Day in summer 2019, starting with a humble post titled “Sonic The Hedgehog’s Stinky Feet.” Five and a half years later, the newsletter boasts more than 100,000 subscribers, with 5% to 10% paying. Garbage Media, now an eight-person team, produces the weekly podcast Panic World, which covers “how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality,” and recently started a research arm called Garbage Day Media Intelligence.

Garbage Day (tagline: “We doomscroll so you don’t have to”) proved particularly crucial in 2025 for its reporting on and analysis of the Charlie Kirk assassination. Its September post, “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme,” was viewed close to 600,000 times, a newsletter record, according to Broderick.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Broderick, who is based in Brooklyn, talks about the kinds of stories that resonate with Garbage Day readers, the perils of working in the “content mines” of the 2010s, and why it’s so important to be “voicey” and “human” in the age of AI slop. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

Why did you become a journalist?

I wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to have a job, so in college I switched to the media program. I was part of the school paper, and I just really liked that culture. So I started writing for blogs. I think my first internship was for The Awl. I worked at Vice, worked at BuzzFeed for a long time, wrote for Gawker for a little bit. Ended up freelancing at The Verge. So I spent the 2010s working in that world. At the end of 2020, I went full-time with Garbage Day. It’s funny, you ask about journalism, but I’ve lived so long now out in the wilderness that I feel very disconnected from that world.

What world do you consider yourself a part of now?

Probably internet creators. I talked to a lot of indie media people, which is a term that kind of appeared out of nowhere a year or two ago. I’ve talked to the 404 people, and I’ve talked to [the people running] Aftermath and places like that. And it is kind of exciting to have this new scene that is starting and that I feel a little more connected to. I feel like having a direct relationship with our audience has put us in a unique position. I’m in a Discord all day with Garbage Day readers. So it feels very much like a community of our own.

How many hours a day do you spend online?

I think it’s a fairly normal amount. I mean, I work on the internet all day. But when I started Garbage Day full-time, I felt like, “If I’m so deep in the weeds on this, no one’s gonna read it.” I never wanted to be in the position that I think a lot of internet culture writers find themselves in, where I’m picking up a random rock and I’m going to look at the bugs.

I have a few systems for tracking stories and content across the week [that] we put into Garbage Day, which means that I can make connections. So it’s not so much like I’m spending time looking at some weird website full of extremists or whatever. It’s more like, “Oh, I’ve noticed this thing across a bunch of different platforms. It’s probably worth writing about.”

You must see some horrible stuff on the internet, though. How bad does it get?

I think everyone does now. We’re a few months out from Charlie Kirk dying online. I don’t go searching for it anymore. When I was younger, I took a much more cavalier approach. But I’m in my mid-30s now, and I don’t really want to sacrifice my psychological health to find some weird internet story. These days, probably X is the biggest cesspool. But I’m not going and trolling around 4chan anymore for stories. I try to use the internet like an average person would, but I know when to add context and how to make connections.

When Panic World met Long Shadow: Listen to Ryan Broderick and Garrett Graff talk “Russia, Russia, Russia”

Ryan Broderick knows a lot when it comes to the web, but he doesn’t quite know what to think about Russian interference in the 2016 election. So on a recent episode of his Panic World podcast, he pulled in Long Shadow host, journalist, and author Garrett Graff to re-examine the truth behind the scandal.

Panic World is a weekly chat show that explores how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality, which is pretty much the story of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, only in a longform narrative format. Episode 6, “Weapons of Mass Distraction,” explains how the North Korea hack of Sony Pictures led to Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee, among other online misdeeds. But there’s more cross-over fun to be had: Broderick is also interested in Howard Dean and “the Dean Scream,” which Graff lived through as a Dean staffer and then covered in episode 2, “Establishing Connection.”

You can catch Broderick’s interview with Graff as a bonus episode in the Long Shadow feed this week, and be sure to listen and subscribe to Panic World, wherever you get your podcasts.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination spurred a conversation online about mainstream media coverage of internet culture, which the alleged shooter was very steeped in. What does the mainstream media get wrong about internet culture?

I was just talking to a friend of mine who has a Ph.D. in memes and internet culture. And he and I were commiserating about this very question, which is that there’s not really any such thing as “internet culture” anymore. Like, it’s just culture. Everything’s online. I would say the biggest misconception is that five years out from the pandemic, there is this attitude, particularly from establishment or mainstream or corporate media, that there’s something different there.

Like, you can look at the installation of Bari Weiss at CBS. That happened because her Substack was popular — this internet thing — and now she’s literally taken over a broadcast media company. So it’s all sort of tied together now, but there’s still, I think, a hesitancy to really reckon with what that means.

What were the big stories that resonated with Garbage Day readers in 2025?

Our coverage of Charlie Kirk was the biggest growth we ever had in a single month. It was the biggest readership we’ve ever had. I was brought on the news to talk about it, so that was a really interesting time for us. According to our metrics, we had a big readership from our coverage of the social media dimensions of the Zohran campaign in New York. We’ve also spent the summer covering the Trump administration’s reliance on social media to dictate policy. So we’ve been covering a lot more politics this year than we usually do, and that has been pretty popular with our readers.

We’re also trying to carve out a more nuanced point of view on AI and where it’s going. And every once in a while, we seem to break through and write something where our readers don’t immediately recoil with disgust at the very mention of AI. In the spring, I did an experiment where I used ChatGPT as a therapist for several months and then compared that to using a human therapist. We try to find ways to play with it and understand and explore it and not totally dismiss it, which kind of comes from my time early on in Garbage Day covering crypto.

Speaking of AI, we’re seeing more and more AI slop “journalism” on the internet. How bad do you think the problem is going to get, and is there anything we can do about it?

I have had all kinds of arguments about this. There’s one way to think about it, like, “AI slop becomes the lowest common denominator product across the web, particularly for working-class people, people in the global south.” In the same way as online journalism right now, if you want to pay for it, you might get good stuff, but if you don’t want to pay for it, you’re looking at right-wing garbage on Facebook. But that sort of implies that AI will get cheap enough that you can keep doing that. But these AI companies don’t make enough money to really run, and it’s still a pretty expensive thing, even if the user is only paying cents on the dollar to generate thousands and thousands of articles.

So I’m not totally sure how that will work out in the long run, but I do think broadly right now is a really good time to be writing in a very voicey, human way. Like with Garbage Day, every issue has a disclaimer at the bottom that says, “Any typos in this email are on purpose actually,” and it’s sort of a fun way to acknowledge that these are posts written by human beings. That voicy-ness is very attractive right now, and it’s something that other human beings are willing to pay for, which is pretty cool.

What stories of yours are you proudest of?

It was very exciting for me this year to set up a Signal account for federal workers to text us about what it was like during the DOGE takeover and to be able to publish that. We were getting emails from different departments, and being able to verify and report that out — we’d never done that kind of scoop-based journalism before.

And then during the Charlie Kirk assassination news cycle, we moved to a daily publishing schedule. Garbage Day has, at most, published three times a week. It’s supposed to be a step back, a digest, a magazine kind of product. We were able to go daily during the Charlie Kirk assassination news cycle because I had hired the people this year to help me scale the business. We were basically running a small newsroom and keeping up with larger publishers and having our stuff cited around the country. It was a really fucked-up cycle, but for me, it felt pretty amazing.

And what story of yours do you most regret?

I spent a large chunk of the summer really trying to go after a more political beat and a more political audience. I think our Trump World coverage was needed at the time, but we probably overdid it, and now we want to go back to kind of bread-and-butter internet culture stories and fun rabbit corners to poke around in, instead of just covering whatever madness is coming out of MAGA every week.

You mentioned your time at BuzzFeed News earlier. How did you bounce back after being fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism?

The major thing there is, I didn’t agree with their decision. I’ve never agreed with it. I have done a lot of soul searching over the years to sort of understand what happened. It’s something that informs my life and my work to this day. It informs Garbage Day in the sense that I want it to be extremely clear where we’re getting everything we’re getting, how we’re editing it. I want the work that I’m doing to be from me and not filtered through a bunch of editors or style guides.

Also, I’m not super-interested in the conditions that a lot of digital media publications had created for young writers in the 2010s, where you are writing constantly, and you are putting yourself in harm’s way by poking some hornet’s nest or fighting with editors about, “How do you write about the internet? And when can you just link to something and say, ‘I want to link to this’?”

Not to get too far into the weeds, but the way Garbage Day functions now is in direct response to the jobs in the content mines that I had in the 2010s that I think were not great environments.

What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

It just continues. You know, I’m on Bluesky. I see people talking about the end of literacy, the end of journalism. And in a way, yes, OK, things are not good. There are not as many jobs as there used to be. The shops and the newsrooms are smaller, but journalism still happens. People will always do it, as long as we have a First Amendment in this country. It’ll just be chaotic and confusing, and there’ll be problems. But the fact that there are little indie media places that are hiring people and doing good work, and they’re finding new technology — or sometimes, in the case of newsletters, discovering old technology — that allows them to do it, that’s just amazing.

Yes, there’s a lot to be pessimistic about. But I’ve lived through probably six layoff cycles and a dozen pivots to video since I graduated from college in the 2000s. It finds a way. I’m fairly optimistic about it, to be honest.

Further reading and listening from Ryan Broderick:

• “Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme” (with Adam Bumas, Garbage Day, Sept. 12, 2025)

• “The logical endpoint of 21st-century America” (Garbage Day, Sept. 11, 2025)

• “How The Internet Created (And Destroyed) Chris Chan” (Panic World, Dec. 10, 2025)

• “How a Disney Cartoon Mouse Inspired an Erotic Cult w/ PJ Vogt” (Panic World, Aug. 13, 2025)

• “Is Nick Fuentes Filling the Void After Charlie Kirk’s Death?” (Rolling Stone, Nov. 24, 2025)

When there’s a really good Santa at Macy’s, it’s easy to leave your own reality behind and disappear into the tinsel-heavy world of Santaland. The name of the guy portraying Kris Kringle? Does it matter?

Oddly enough, the same goes for a beautifully-crafted longform magazine story. If the writer does their job right, the reader gets to step into a different timeline and place. The name of the writer? You promise yourself you’ll remember it but the story — the story! — that’s what sticks once you’ve finished reading.

David Gauvey Herbert is the kind of writer who does that for his readers. He won’t even be offended if you remember his writing but not his name. But you’ll want to find out more about his work after reading his latest piece for Esquire, “Yes, Bob, There Is a Santa Clause.”

The article, about a man whose life was shaped by the time he spent as the lead member of Macy’s red-suited pack of “ho ho ho”-ers, is one of the most human pieces of journalism you’ve read in a long while. It’s exactly the piece you need when everything else seems — to put it mildly — pretty bleak.

And once you find out what else Herbert’s written, you probably won’t be surprised that some of your favorites are on the list. (Really. Check it twice.)

“One thing I have not done super well is cultivate any sort of name recognition, because I haven’t written a book yet,” Herbert says.

Depth Perception spoke to Herbert about his Santa story and why he was so devoted to this one man’s tale. Consider our conversation with him our gift to you. Happy holidays! — Jenna Schnuer

Macy’s is famously quiet about the men who play Santa in their stores and in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. How did the Santa piece come about? How did you find your Santa?

About seven years ago, I was at a bar in Uptown Manhattan, and through a friend of mine, I met this guy who had been down and out, got divorced, lost touch with his kid. He got the idea to become a Macy’s Santa and this basically saved his life. Stepping into the red suit gives you this ability to kind of rehab your life. It’s this really unique opportunity for guys who [haven’t really been treated well by] life, to kind of come back to life in a new way.

I cast around the country. I talked to scores of Santas around the country, heard these incredible stories, but everything kept pointing back to Macy’s. And Macy’s is really where the real Santa lives. If you’ve watched Miracle on 34th Street, the lore — the Christmas canon — is at Macy’s. The Macy’s Santas wouldn’t talk. Most of them wouldn’t talk. Macy’s corporate wouldn’t talk. They didn’t want to be part of an article.

Then I was searching around on YouTube, and I found this super cheesy reality show from the 2000s where Macy’s briefly allowed camera crews to poke around Santaland. There was this one Macy’s executive, Bob Rutan, this tall, handsome guy, who was the star of that episode. And so I call him up to meet for lunch. He looks totally different. He’s gone from like a swish executive to that vagabond guy with a cowboy hat. And it turns out that he’d been fired by Macy’s after the show came out for different things, but he had the most incredible stories of Santaland. He himself had started out as a Santa. I [talked to] more Santas and more Santas, but I kept coming back to Bob. One story in particular that he told I could not shake. And so I knew that we had to build a story around him.

When did you start talking to him?

I think we met in the summer of 2023. It took me a while to decide to focus on him, and then once I did, basically from the summer until now, we’ve been spending time together.

What were his concerns about being featured in the story?

There really is a sense among these Macy’s Santas that you shouldn’t be talking about what goes on there. [That] they need to keep the curtain closed. I think he was worried about dredging up the past, just with his wife and with his friends. Because, you know, after he got fired [from Macy’s], there were some dark times. He did some stuff he wasn’t proud of [and] he was so brutally honest.

More from Depth Perception: An interview with the NY Times, Washington Post, and Publishers Weekly book of the year-winner

Once you decided you wanted to write about Rutan, how long did it take to sell the story to a magazine?

I pitched it to another magazine earlier in the summer, and they said, “We love the idea. It’s great, but not Bob, he’s not the right character.” Well, [I said] I disagree. So then I pitched it to Esquire. They had some questions. I said, “Trust me. Trust me, trust me.” Because really, the story is totally out of character with any other story I’ve written ever. Most of my stories are trying to make you question your faith in humanity, or they’re about rapscallions and we’re trying to humanize these people that have done odious things.

I think they were sort of confused why I was even writing this. I think the Esquire editors really thought this was going to be this big exposé, a David Herbert exposé of Santaland, and there’s going to be, like, violence and sex and drugs. But no, it’s just guys making it all work and putting it together in the red suit. And they went along with it, which I thank them for.

This is just a sweet, sweet story that makes you cry at the end and want to call your dad or something — that was the goal of the story. And I was very heartened in the comments and on Reddit and text messages from people saying that they were crying on the subway and on Amtrak.

What did it feel like to work on this piece? Has it changed the kind of work you want to do moving forward?

It seems like we live in this cultural moment where everything is just tearing down the past and tearing down the present, and opining about the future. I think about the movies I love and some of the books I love, and even some of the magazine articles I love, and they’re hopeful. Not to say life isn’t super complicated, but I think people have gotten away from even looking for these stories because they’re considered schmaltzy, small town profile stuff.

My former editor at Esquire would call them walking-the-dog stories: Stories that you read, and then a few days later you’re out walking the dog, you’re thinking about the story again, and you’re like, “Shit, I need to call my dad,” or “I need to call my daughter.”

It’s both cinematic, but also this human experience where you realize that you and the character maybe aren’t that different. And it could be inspiring, it could be terrifying, it could be reassuring. It could be worrying. It doesn’t actually have to be a happy ending, but it has to be an ending that is like finding the vein — that human vein that connects us all.

Further reading and viewing from David Gauvey Herbert:

• “Bad Dojo: Tiger Schulmann Didn’t Get to Be America’s No. 1 Karate Kingpin Without Busting a Few Faces” (Esquire, Apr. 22, 2025)

• “A Ninety-Nine-Year-Old Lawyer’s Final Case” (The New Yorker on YouTube, Nov. 26, 2024)

• “How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular” (The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 22, 2024)

• “The Case of the Fake Sherlock” (New York Magazine, April 11, 2023)

• “The Epic Family Feud Behind a Weight Loss Camp for Kids” (Bloomberg Businessweek, Aug. 26, 2021)

When documentary podcaster, writer, director, and producer Dan Taberski released Missing Richard Simmons in 2017, he broke open a new understanding of what great narrative podcasting could be. The show, which looked into the ‘80s fitness instructor Richard Simmons’ sudden retirement from public life, became a cultural lightning rod that spawned intense debates over celebrity privacy and the ethical limits of investigative reporting.

Despite the controversy (and the fact that I’ve long been podcast-averse), Missing was my first favorite podcast ever, because it wasn’t a show with the cleanest answers; it was a story with fuller, complicated questions.

Eight years later, it and every other podcast — or “audio documentary,” as Taberski likes to call them — that makes up his kaleidoscopic portfolio has demonstrated that great stories need not be driven by forensic fact-finding. “It was an emotional investigation that was the real motor,” Taberski says.

Taberski has since used the audio documentary form to interrogate many cultural phenomenons including: the Y2K conundrum, a Navy SEAL war crimes trial, TV’s longest-running reality show and its impact on law enforcement, the world after Sept. 11, and a mysterious illness that spread through a group of high school girls in Upstate New York in 2011. The latter, Taberski’s latest show, was named the Apple Podcast of the Year in 2024 and won the Ambie Award for Podcast of the Year in 2025.

Like many industries today, podcasting is undergoing a lot of hand wringing. But Taberski has kept working, with his seventh show slated to release next summer. Over his podcasting career, he says he’s become more comfortable with diving into a story before having absolute certainty about how it’s told.

“I think there’s a lot of storytelling that happens now where people are trying to use the story as a way to get listeners to feel something, or to believe something that you believe,” says Taberski. “For me, what makes the best story is actually having a storyteller who’s not sure either.”

In an era when creative industries feel compelled to bend toward predictability, or toward formats that are easy to market, adapt, or monetize, Taberski’s work feels like a reminder of what originally made podcasting exciting: its unruliness, its nuance, and its permission to go deep. In this edition of Depth Perception, he discusses what has stuck over the last eight years of making audio documentaries and why, despite a volatile business landscape, he still has hope for longform audio storytelling. — Kelly Kimball

When you begin a project like Missing Richard Simmons or Hysterical, how much of the narrative arc do you map out ahead of time, and how much emerges once you’re deep into the reporting?

I’m always thinking about [the narrative arc] from the very beginning, but it… evolves constantly. I’m always outlining and always restructuring and moving things around and trying to figure out… how the order with which you reveal information makes you hear things differently.

The planning that I do is more [about] trying to keep track of what I’m doing as I’m doing it. I’m always trying to see the whole project from as wide a view as possible, to get a sense of what it is I’m building, and how the different conversations I’m having are changing that 30,000-foot view.

When I’m having a conversation and somebody disabuses me of a notion that I have about their own story, or points me in a different direction, or surprises me — those are the things that I want to make room for. It always depends on what the people say. I always try to begin with the conversations that we’ve had and use the revelations and the emotional conversation — that’s how I structure the story. I’m backing into those things more often than I am backing into plot points.

In 2019, Vulture named your first podcast one of “the 10 nonfiction podcasts that changed everything.” It said the enduring legacy of Missing Richard Simmons is in the way it highlighted that “podcasting is still largely an undefined medium. Podcasting offers creators of all kinds… the opportunity to play with new, unexpected boundaries.” Do you agree with that assessment? Do you think the podcasting medium is still boundless today?

Absolutely. As an art form? For sure. Whether or not that’s what the market wants right now is probably a different answer. But I’m okay with that. Sometimes what you want to make is not what everybody else wants. That’s why I left television originally, because I just didn’t want to make what the market was wanting to make.

It’s harder to get boxed in a corner in something like podcasting because nobody’s told me the way it needs to be arranged. There’s no format I’m trying to fit into. It doesn’t have to be, like, 30 minutes to fit into a network news thing. It can be scary, but I like it.

Is there anything that you understand now about how to build an audio documentary that you didn’t know when you made your first show? Have you become a different kind of storyteller along the way?

I’m working on my seventh [podcast] right now, and it’s completely changed in terms of what I thought was possible.

I definitely learned that it’s less about the facts than I would have thought originally. What I learned [about] making Missing Richard Simmons is that… it was an emotional investigation that was the real motor for it. Now I approach every project with… a main factual question, and then an emotional question that I’m trying to answer.

With Hysterical, what happened to the 19 girls in Le Roy, New York, and what were they sick with, and how did they find out, and what are the facts of that story? That’s [all] really important. It moves [the story] along. But the more important investigative question was: What do you do when people tell you it’s all in your head? The “what did it feel like” questions end up having more to…investigate in terms of why we do things the way we do, and how we react to things. That’s the stuff I find appealing and the most meaty to explore, and I think the most satisfying to listen to.

Long Shadow: “Rigorous, authoritative, and an electrifying listen.”

“How did we get here?” Through a series of riveting, complex narratives, Long Lead’s podcast Long Shadow makes sense of what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history, including Waco, Columbine, Y2K, 9/11, COVID-19, January 6, and beyond.

Hosted by Pulitzer finalist, historian, author, and journalist Garrett Graff, this Peabody-nominated podcast has been called “rigorous, authoritative, and an electrifying listen” by the Financial Times and honored as one of the year’s best podcasts by The Atlantic, Audible, Mashable, Rolling Stone, and The Week. A winner of the Edward R. Murrow Award and the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award, it has also been honored with eight Signal Awards, including for Best History, Best Documentary, Best Technology, and Best Activism, Public Service, & Social Impact Podcast.

The second season of Long Shadow has been added to the history program at the University of Houston and the third season has been integrated into Harvard Law School’s curriculum on the Second Amendment.

Listen to Long Shadow wherever you get your podcasts, and learn more at www.longshadowpodcast.com.

How do you know when you’ve stumbled upon your next project? What elements need to be in place for you to dive right in?

I need to be confused by it. It needs to be a story that I don’t know how I feel about, or it needs to be a story that I am conflicted about how I feel about it.

I did a podcast on the war crimes trial of a Navy SEAL, and I really couldn’t decide how I felt about it as I went in. And I think most people wouldn’t approach it that way. I think there’s a lot of storytelling that happens now where people are trying to use the story as a way to get listeners to feel something or to believe something that you believe, and by the end of the story they’ll believe it too. I don’t necessarily know that that’s what makes for the best story. For me, what makes the best story is actually having a storyteller who’s not sure either, and… you can listen to the process of [that storyteller] trying to figure it out.

It can’t be [faked]. It has to be really something that you’re confused about. It was like that for me with the war crime story. It’s like, yes, I get that crossing the line in war is wrong, morally wrong. But also, what do you do when you’re a soldier in a place that’s halfway around the world, and the military is setting up all these ways for you to break the rules, and yet people back home don’t want you to break the rules? Like, who’s responsible here? I found that confusion — being perplexed about how to react to a story — that’s the thing that gets me interested, and keeps me interested.

You mentioned earlier that you left the TV industry [where you were once a producer on “The Daily Show”] because the market was saying one thing but your curiosities were saying another. Then you jumped into audio storytelling. Can you speak to how you toe the line of what you want to pursue, what the podcasting world wants, and what you ultimately end up doing?

The business side is really complicated. And the rate of change is so fucking fast. Thirty years ago, there were no such thing as podcasts, and now I’m making them. I think trying to chase the business side, for me, is a fool’s errand. I just try to focus on what I want to do, what I can do, and what I’m not done with yet.

For a while the industry was saying everything needs to be [intellectual property]. But I don’t think the way to make good IP is to focus on making good IP. I think the way to make good IP is to focus on making the best fucking story that you can make that’s incredibly compelling and demands that people listen to it, and is entertaining and fun and meaningful. And then it’s not my job to figure out how that becomes IP. That’s somebody else’s job. And I think that’s what makes the best IP — the most original, compelling thing you can make.

Are there any questions that I’m not asking, or anything else you want to mention?

I’m optimistic. I’m optimistic because there’s always stuff to make. People need a way of understanding what’s going on around them. I feel like the types of things that I make, the types of longer-form things, they’ll continue to be there. You just have to not be shaken when they start calling it something different, or there’s a different monetization model, or… you know what I mean? You just gotta focus on making.

Further listening from Dan Taberski:

• Hysterical (Wondery, released July 1, 2024)

• 9/12 (Wondery, released September 8, 2021)

• The Line (Wondery, released April 6, 2021)

• Running from COPS (Topic/Pineapple Street Media, released April 23, 2019)

• Surviving Y2K (Topic/Pineapple Street Media, released November 13, 2018)

• Missing Richard Simmons (Topic/Pineapple Street Media, released February 15, 2017)

When Seamus Hughes discovered that Julian Assange had been secretly indicted by the U.S. government, he didn’t immediately recognize it as a major scoop. He’d been casually scrolling through court documents after reading Dragons Love Tacos to his kids, when he noticed something odd: a routine sexual exploitation case in the Eastern District of Virginia had two national security prosecutors attached to it. Clicking through the filing, he found a copy-paste error on one page that revealed prosecutors’ attempts to keep Assange’s indictment sealed. Hughes tweeted it out, went to bed, and woke up to find his discovery on the front page of The Washington Post.

It’s typical of Hughes’s unusual career and the precarious state of court reporting in America. A terrorism scholar by training, Hughes has spent years developing an uncanny mastery of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) — the federal court system’s notoriously difficult database. That made him what former Rolling Stone editor Noah Shachtman calls “the no shit, uncontested expert” on federal court filings. His discoveries have broken hundreds of national stories, from a Coast Guard officer’s assassination plot to corruption investigations of LA City Council members. In 2022, he was part of a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on law enforcement in America.

Three years ago, Hughes turned his PACER obsession into Court Watch, a newsletter that covers the overlooked corners of the federal court system. But despite breaking story after story — often scooping major outlets with far more resources — Court Watch is struggling financially. Hughes recently revealed the publication is “dangerously close” to being unsustainable, losing more paid subscribers than it gains each month. It’s a tension that captures independent journalism’s current moment: Court Watch has become essential infrastructure for legal reporting, yet it operates on a shoestring budget. Hughes works from his home in the Washington, D.C. area, where he’s also a professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Hughes about how reading court documents became his form of “mental floss” from studying neo-Nazis and ISIS, why he keeps training journalists who could theoretically replace him, and what it’s like breaking major stories that don’t always earn attribution — or income. —Parker Molloy

How did you get into journalism?

It’s all over the place, bizarre. I am a terrorism scholar by trade, so I track every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants to kill us — white supremacists, neo-Nazis, ISIS, al-Qaeda, that kind of thing — anything there’s an American nexus to.

About eight or nine years ago, I was trying to figure out how many guys have been arrested for ISIS-related activities in the U.S. I could not rely on the DOJ’s press releases to tell me the full story because they’d hide the ball or they didn’t like the sentencing or the guy flipped. So I had to go through 94 different federal districts to find every case, and I’d find 20 to 30 to 40 cases that were just sitting there.

As I was doing that, I would come across stuff that had nothing to do with terrorism that I found interesting but wasn’t my beat, for lack of a better word. So I would just tweet it out — like half the LA City Council on the take, or Julian Assange under indictment. I would just tweet it out and be like, “Listen, this is not my area of expertise, but enjoy.”

After a while, I got kind of annoyed that things I thought were interesting weren’t getting picked up. So I slid into Noah Shachtman’s DMs at The Daily Beast and I was like, “Listen Noah, I’m not a journalist. I didn’t go to J-school, I didn’t cut my teeth on a local paper, but I think there are good stories I’m finding and I think they should be told.”

Noah, to his credit, took a flier on me and basically assigned me with another reporter, and we would just knock out pieces together. I would learn the process of like, “Okay, this is how you write a lede, and this is how you write a kicker.”

Then about six years ago, a bunch of New York Times reporters rallied together and pitched the editor at the D.C. bureau and said, “This silly academic in Nebraska keeps scooping us. We should just bring him on board.” So I’ve been with the New York Times to be their Johnny-on-the-spot for all things federal court records. It could be the Hunter Biden indictment, it could be tracking every lawsuit against the Trump administration, and then it kind of snowballed from there.

I worked for Rolling Stone when Noah went over there. I’ve been with Bloomberg Law for the last two years on an investigation piece we’re doing on civil rights. And then at some point I found stuff I found interesting that didn’t rise to a national level or was a little too niche. So I kind of built Court Watch as — I don’t say leftovers, but the island of misfit toys of court records I found that I thought should see the light of day. We just hit our three-year anniversary.

A big part of what you do is using PACER. You’ve described PACER as your hobby, what you’d indulge in during boring football games or after putting your kids to bed. When did reading court documents transition from research necessity to something you genuinely enjoy?

It has everything to do with my day job, which is to try to figure out puzzles, right? The puzzle sometimes is going to be a guy who came back from Syria who joined ISIS for a year, and I want to know why a kid from an Ivy League school spent a year in ISIS and what makes him tick. So he’s a puzzle to me — human, but a puzzle too.

Then I’d see court records as a puzzle too, right? A little snippet here, one line in a footnote — what does that actually mean? Let’s pull the thread on that.

In many ways it became mental floss for me. I spend my days looking at neo-Nazis and beheading videos. I don’t have a dog in the fight of a city council member in Sacramento who’s on the take. But it is mental floss to forget about the fact that I just watched an 8-year-old kid learn how to build a bomb in Raqqa.

That was kind of a way to do it. I just kept assuming I would work my way out of a job. I’ve trained hundreds of journalists a year on how to do PACER, but the news deserts keep happening and the teams keep going down and there’s just not anyone out there that has the wherewithal to keep up with it. So I just figured I’d just keep churning along till somebody told me otherwise.

A nation of laws or a nation of guns?

America’s gun violence crisis isn’t a cultural inevitability — it’s the result of decades of legal and legislative choices. The Long Lead podcast Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust traces how lobbying power, court rulings, and strategic political maneuvering reshaped the Second Amendment into something far broader than its original intent, creating a framework in which meaningful regulation is nearly impossible.

Hosted by Pulitzer finalist and investigative reporter Garrett M. Graff and reported in collaboration with The Trace, the podcast explores the story of the people — some names you’ll know, some you won’t — who changed the way America relates to guns, for better or worse. By unpacking how lawmakers and judges expanded individual gun rights while weakening public-safety measures, the series reframes the debate: America doesn’t just have a gun problem; it also has a legal system that’s been engineered to protect guns over people.

Listen to the Peabody-nominated, RFK Human Rights Award-winner Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust wherever you get your podcasts.

For people who don’t know, what is PACER?

PACER is a god-awful system. It’s one of the worst things ever created in life. It is the online repository for all things federal court records: 94 different districts all have 94 different websites. They all file things 94 different ways. So if you want to search [for] a warrant in Iowa, it’s different than [searching for a] warrant in Idaho.

It’s a fee-based system. It’s 10 cents a search and then 10 cents a page to download, as if PDFs get more expensive the bigger they are. The U.S. courts rake in like $145 million a year on that racket. There’s a bunch of information that’s there, but it’s behind a paywall or it’s just hidden, right? Who’s going to spend the time to look at exhibit 20 out of 40 on a defense motion? Just me, I think, is what the takeaway is for that.

For some reason my weird, beautiful mind can tell you how they file things in the Northern District of California versus Southern District of Florida. I can find the Epstein grand jury motions before anybody else. I wish I had a better hobby. I wish I could play guitar or do something that benefits mankind, but this is what I got.

The Julian Assange scoop came from you noticing national security prosecutors were listed on a routine indecent exposure case. That’s the kind of anomaly that most people would never catch. Walk me through how you actually search PACER. What are you looking for?

I’m looking for weird quirks, things that seem a little bit off. Julian Assange is a great example. It’s a case in the Eastern District of Virginia. It is a sexual exploitation case that should be a run-of-the-mill, low-level assistant U.S. attorney who’s working that case. But for some reason there were two national security prosecutors on that case.

My immediate thought was, “Okay, this is probably a terrorism case.” Let me just track it, see until I get to a point where they say this is a terrorism case. At some point I clicked on one of the filings and page one was normal and page two was like, “Julian Assange has been indicted and we must keep this sealed” or “keep the seal.”

I’ve got to be honest with you, I forgot about it. A couple days passed and I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting, move on.” Then The Wall Street Journal put out some story that Julian Assange is under indictment and they were using sources. I was like, “Well, there’s not sources. There’s primary source documents you can use to cite that.” So I just tweeted it out after I read Dragons Love Tacos to my kid. It kind of snowballed from there.

Upon reflection, if I had been a classically trained journalist, I probably would have stopped, written a story, asked for comments on both sides, probably been yelled at by a DOJ flack about why I can’t publish it and how it’s going to be a national security problem, and all the things. But I was new to the game, so I didn’t know how to play it. I just thought to myself, “I’m just going to throw it out in the ether and good reporters are going to do good reporting on this.”

The Columbia Journalism Review wrote that your work “has repeatedly broken news that the press would have otherwise missed.” But you’ve also been criticized, including by a New York Times reporter, for tweeting out findings rather than sharing them privately with journalists first. What’s your philosophy on that?

It varies. It’s changed. What’s frustrating to me now is I’ll find something in Texas and I’ll start googling to figure out what the local El Paso Times is, and they’re not around anymore. So I’ve got to send it out. If I think it’s a story that warrants more than just a few retweets, I try to find a reporter to run it down to ground on it.

That reporter was Adam Goldman, and he was giving me shit because The Times wanted that story. Fast forward to three months later, they hire me, right? So I get it. But also there’s some level of gatekeeping I don’t think we need to be so worried about on these types of things.

I always get a kick out of — and I do this probably six to 10 times a week — I’ll send a lead to some random KCTV reporter in Minnesota and be like, “Listen, I think this is pretty good. It looks like your mayor is doing something shady.” And they’re like, “Why are you sending — what’s your angle?” I don’t have an angle. I just really like journalism. I think there’s not enough journalists in the world. I think stories are not getting told. If I can kick it to John Smith to go be a reporter, all the better, because I’ve got a thousand other things going on.

You’ve broken hundreds of stories that get picked up by major news outlets, but not always with attribution. What’s it like being in this position where your work has become essential for court reporting, but you’re operating without the institutional backing of a major news organization — on the Court Watch side of things, at least?

It’s terrifying. I was lucky that I got pulled into the beehiiv Media Collective last year, so I have a lawyer that I can ping for things I’m worried about in terms of defamation pieces, and I have a million dollars-worth of insurance for liability, which in this day and age is quite useful.

I do get frustrated when I see the aggressively political hot-take-on-Substack guy announce he’s going to start a Substack and he gets like a million paid followers, and I’m grinding out every day stories that I think are interesting and working them. That’s frustrating as hell to me, but it is what it is. What are you going to do?

You’ve said Court Watch tries not to put your finger on the scales too hard politically. You just provide direct links to documents.

I don’t fault anyone for being political in nature. I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not good at it. I don’t get fired up internally. I’m not the guy who’s going to be standing on a picket line. It’s just not my vibe. I think there are really good reporters that do that, but I would just be one of thousands that did that. Whereas I don’t think there’s a whole lot of folks left anymore who are just doing the “just the facts, ma’am” approach to these types of things.

I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to deal with all of it. I get enough death threats from neo-Nazis. I don’t need more from angry Republicans or Democrats. So this is kind of my way to do it.

I started my career in the Senate Homeland Security Committee, so I was a Congressional staffer who had no idea what he was doing. My boss was a guy named Jim McGee who was a former investigative reporter at the Miami Herald and The Washington Post. He actually got a Pulitzer for breaking the Gary Hart story like 30–40 years ago. He taught me how to dig for documents, how to look for the random stuff, and how to just be appreciative that there is a Fourth Estate out there to help get this out there. That kind of stuck with me for 20 years. I think to myself when I do things, “What would Jim do?” You’ve got to have the goods and you can’t just opine to opine for sake.

What story of yours are you most proud of breaking?

It was not a breaking story, but I thought it was good. Early this year, I found a search warrant — I think in Mississippi — of the FBI trying to get tower dumps, which are basically like, “We’re going to pull all the phone records for anyone who’s anywhere near the cell phone tower in order to find like three guys we’re worried about.” I thought, “Okay, we can have a policy debate on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. Are there civil rights and civil liberties things?” But then they sealed the document, the docket.

That annoyed me to no end because it was unsealed for a long time until someone asked — namely me — and then they sealed it. So we hired a lawyer. I pinged all my subscribers until I found a media lawyer who randomly was a Court Watch subscriber. He wrote a pro bono thing. I ponied up $300 to $500 for a local attorney to file a motion to unseal it, and we got it unsealed the next day. The judge was like, “Oh, it was an oversight.” Sure, whatever. But it’s out there. That’s a cool story for me, just the ability to get information out that wouldn’t normally [get out]. ACLU’s now a party in the lawsuit trying to push it out and things like that. All of that is interesting to me.

I like ones that are small ball to everyone else but interesting to me. There was a National Parks ranger who got charged at the federal level for interfering with a state local police officer on an investigation. That was clearly a turf battle. I thought to myself, “This is silly. Why are you bringing a federal charge against a park ranger for working a case you didn’t want to work?” I asked the DOJ and the next day they dropped the case. Those little wins do matter. For that one park ranger, the fact that I shot an email did change her life dramatically. That’s cool. That’s what you want to have — journalism that’s impactful in some ways.

On the flip side of that, have you ever regretted publishing something?

Yeah, a number of times, particularly in my early career. I don’t know if the word “regret” would work for the Julian Assange thing, but at the end of the day, that prosecutor — or that paralegal — just messed up. Now their name is attached to a huge mistake. Upon reflection, I would have called over probably on those types of things.

I didn’t publish it, but I got close to it. I did a search warrant one time of a gentleman who had allegedly hacked a celebrity’s phone. I was about to hit send on the publication and something fell off in the back of my mind. I called around and it turned out that his neighbor had stolen his Wi-Fi to do it, so it wasn’t the guy I was looking at. I could have ruined some guy’s Google searches for the rest of his life based on that story and opened myself up to a whole lot of lawsuits. But even just in general, I thought it was — so now my standards of when I’m going to write has risen much more than it was five years ago.

More from Depth Perception:

What is the best career advice that you’ve ever received?

I think back to my congressional investigations days, which is: It is a one-day story for you and it’s a lifetime for the subject of your investigation. I’m sure I failed in 20 years. I’m sure there’s moments where I did not remember those lessons on those types of things, but it’s important. I try to remember that as much as possible.

The advice I give other people is: in a dwindling journalism world, you’ve got to be really good at at least one thing so that the guys in the corner office can’t get rid of you. They would be lost if they didn’t have a FOIA person or lost if they didn’t have a court reporter. They have to figure out the money for that.

What makes you hopeful or concerned about the future of court reporting as news deserts expand?

I think the more local you go on your reporting, the more likely you are to be successful. That seems counterintuitive because the pool of subscribers should be smaller, but people do care if there’s going to be a park built in their neighborhood and they’d like to know how the city council voted on that. They probably don’t care as much that park funding has been cut $100 million last year. You’ve got to kind of make it real for them. I think court reporting does allow for that.

I am hopeful. I have this colleague, Peter Beck, who’s a reporting fellow with us. He’s 20-something and he reached out to me a year ago and said, “Listen, I’m a subscriber. I think it’s interesting. Can I intern?” I was like, “Well, I’ve never done that and I don’t like the idea of unpaid stuff, so let’s talk about an honorarium and I’ll just keep losing money.”

He’s a really good reporter — probably the best reporter I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters. I’m hopeful that there are diamonds in the rough out there who are able to do that. He needed some guidance in terms of, “Make sure you ask this question,” or “Add ‘according to court records’ as opposed to your own opinion” — those things. But those are all trainable stuff that you don’t actually need to have four years at Columbia with $100,000 in debt to do. You can figure this out. So I’m hopeful of that.

There’s not a lot of court reporters left, but there are a few good ones. There’s a guy at Detroit News named Robert Snell, and I’ve been following Robert for a while. He’s been there forever. He moved his desk — he may deny this, but he did — he moved his desk to a window that overlooks the back of the courthouse because that’s where the grand jury folks would come in, so he would be able to see when people were about to get indicted for things. I desperately want more Robert Snells in the world because they’re good reporters that are doing good work and have been around the block long enough to know to move their desk from the office to the really bad desk in front of the computer.

Further reading from Seamus Hughes

• “Sentencing terrorist leaders and their followers: Evidence from Islamic State defendants in U.S. Federal courts, 2014–2024” (with Camden Carmichael and Austin C. Doctor; Taylor & Francis Online, March 9, 2025)

• “A Quick Guide to the Lawsuits Against the Trump Orders” (with Mattathias Schwartz, The New York Times, Feb. 9, 2025)

• “A Small Govt Agency Saved Taxpayers’ Millions, Now Congress’ Inaction May Shut It Down” (Court Watch, July 31, 2024)

• “Tipster Arrested After Feds Find AI Child Exploit Images and Plans to Make VR CSAM” (with Jason Koebler, 404 Media, Dec. 24, 2024)

• “Read FTX’s Bankruptcy Filings for Yourself” (Gizmodo, Nov. 14, 2022)

• Homegrown: ISIS in America (with Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens and Bennett Clifford; I.B. Tauris, 2020)

When Dave Jorgenson launched The Washington Post’s TikTok account in 2019, the platform was still widely dismissed as a place for teenagers to lip-sync and dance. Six years later, after amassing nearly 2 million followers and racking up over 1 billion views, Jorgenson did something that would have seemed unthinkable to an earlier generation of journalists: He walked away from one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country to start his own thing.

That “thing” is Local News International, a social-first media company Jorgenson co-founded this past summer with two of his former colleagues — Micah Gelman, The Post‘s former director of video, and Lauren Saks, who edited and approved Jorgenson’s TikToks. Their pitch is straightforward: build a modern version of what “The Daily Show” was in the mid-2000s, but for the YouTube Shorts and TikTok generation.

It’s a bold bet that personal brand and authentic voice can compete with institutional authority, especially at a moment when traditional news outlets are hemorrhaging both audiences and credibility. Jorgenson’s approach — using humor and accessible explanations to cut through the noise of breaking news — has already proven it can work at scale. The question now is whether it can work without The Washington Post‘s name attached.

From his home base in Kansas City, Missouri (after years of filming in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C.), Jorgenson spoke with Depth Perception about his new venture and how he is testing whether the industry’s anxiety about letting journalists build their own audiences was justified all along. If he succeeds, Local News International could become a template for how independent media ventures actually work in 2025. —Parker Molloy

Can you tell me a bit about why you became a journalist?

I would argue I kind of fell into it backwards. I basically chose the college I went to because they had this list of internships through this group called Media Fellows. And that list was “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” and shows I really wanted to work on because I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a TV writer. So I was like, “I’m going to apply to this so I can get into this program and hopefully get an internship.” And all that actually happened, which is crazy in hindsight. I mean, I ended up getting an internship at “The Colbert Report” through this program.

But that was during the 2012 election year, and I found myself very infatuated or excited about the applications of journalism, even at “The Colbert Report,” and how you could use humor and comedy, which makes sense given what I do today. And because I joined this Media Fellows program, as part of the requirement I had to participate in the newspaper and radio journalism and everything. So I ended up graduating college with not literally a degree in journalism, but a really good understanding of journalism. And then everything just kind of led to another world. I kept ending up at places that covered the news and/or were The Washington Post. So it was kind of a happy accident, but it was something that happened over time as I grew to love the world of journalism.

Before Local News International, you were The Washington Post TikTok guy. Was that a role you pitched? Did it find you? How did that come about?

I think the most important part of that — because [The Post] was really big on Twitter initially. So everyone on Twitter kind of knew about how it was growing, especially in 2019. And then the rest of the world, as the pandemic happened, got on TikTok and it became even bigger. But it wasn’t as if The Post hired me to do that. I was already at The Washington Post and I’d been there for two years starting in 2017. And I was making a YouTube channel that was getting no views. I was doing all these videos that were taking weeks to post that got 900 views or something.

And so when I read about TikTok — I think it was a Taylor Lorenz article for The Atlantic or something in 2018 — I was like, this is interesting. So I downloaded the app and then just convinced them to let me make TikToks. In fact, one of my co-founders, Micah — he was the head of video — said I could do it. And then my other co-founder, Lauren, was my editor who approved every single video from the get-go.

So “the TikTok guy” thing just happened as TikTok launched and was successful. But I do think that if it weren’t successful from the jump, none of this would have happened, at least in the same way. Because the success, especially on Twitter and in the D.C. high school that it is, sort of catapulted it. And I think as other people and other publications talked about it, it made it more palatable to the people inside The Post that we were doing this TikTok thing.

Long Lead, short videos. Follow us on TikTok and YouTube:

@long_leadThe internet, mankind’s greatest invention, promised to unite people across the globe. This is the story of how — driven by profits and power — it tore the world apart instead. Long Lead's Edward R. Murrow award-winning podcast LONG SHADOW is back for a fourth season: BREAKING THE INTERNET answering the question, “How did we get here?” The first episode is out now and episode two drops next week. Find it where you get your podcasts. #podcast #longshadow #internet #socialmedia #worldnews #internetculture #historypodcast

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Long Lead is much more than longform journalism — follow us on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram to catch our rich, visual features in motion. Including second-looks, alternate takes, and behind the scenes footage, our videos are a great way to get more informed on our award-winning features.

You were creating content on a platform that’s fundamentally about entertainment and virality for an institution built on serious journalism. How did you navigate that tension?

I hope this doesn’t seem like a cop-out answer, but, to me, the tension made it good. I liked that. I liked going up to the line as much as I could. And that is what made it good and fun for me and also for the audience from the “I can’t believe they let him do that” kind of thing. So I thought the tension actually helped.

I also was mostly shielded from anything. Most of the negative feedback I found out way after the fact. Even now, I’m just starting to hear about people who weren’t into it. But I was just so happy on my own making it. And again, it was the success. You couldn’t argue against the numbers, which wasn’t what I was necessarily consciously thinking about when it was coming out. But it makes sense that if there was any tension, it didn’t really matter.

And the other thing that’s really important — and this is something I learned from “The Colbert Report” — is the more buy-in you can get from up top, the more everyone else gets into it. So I put Marty Baron in a TikTok very early on and his participation made it very easy for me to go, “Hey, David Fahrenthold, you want to be in this TikTok? Hey, Carlos Lozada.” And, “Well, Marty did it last week.” So that helped to ease it a little bit.

So then you left one of the most prestigious newspapers in the country to start Local News International. What was the calculus there and what could you do with LNI that you couldn’t do at The Post?

It had been really percolating for a long time. Not as a result of going back to the office necessarily, but around that time is when I started thinking, “I could do this on my own.” Because it went from, The Post was helping me [and] I was getting attention because I work for The Washington Post. And I felt like it started to go the other way around where it was like, “I think The Post needs me more than I need The Post.”

And there is nothing necessarily wrong with that relationship. It was just that with a combination of, “I think I want to do more here that I no longer can do. It was basically just a hamster wheel at that point of, “Let’s keep putting out content that we know is working.” But what else, what other goals can we achieve? And I think I basically achieved all those goals.

They allowed me to launch my own YouTube channel at the beginning of the year. And I was working on that on the side while working on The Post stuff. I got to a point where I’d rather just work on my channel. And then with everything else happening both internally and externally, including that they offered everyone on video a buyout, I was like, “Great, this is my time to exit. I’m happy to do it and I’ll do it as gracefully as I can.” But I’m ready to go.

Can you tell me a little bit about what Local News International is? What do you do?

For people who aren’t familiar, the big clear offering right now is daily short-form videos. We took everything from TikTok and YouTube Shorts and Reels where we post as well. Those are through all of my personal channels that are sometimes called Local News International, sometimes called just @DaveJorgenson.

The main concept or the main argument for what we’re doing is that a lot of it is around misinformation and what people are getting wrong in the news. So I don’t necessarily make videos about breaking news — today’s a perfect example. [Editor’s note: This interview took place on November 13, 2025.] I’m still kind of waiting out what’s the fallout of the end of the government shutdown and the Epstein emails coming out. I’m definitely going to cover it. But I feel like right now, as you and I are talking, we’re sort of seeing how Republicans and Democrats are reacting. So I’d much rather wait a day to then recap it basically versus ongoing coverage because everyone’s doing that anyway.

So a lot of it is kind of correcting the record after the fact, but also a bit more of an explainer for people that feel like they’re out of the loop. And obviously there’s a comedic lens to it, which borderlines on commentary sometimes. But I think really the point is I’m just trying to find a funny way into something that might otherwise be either a very depressing topic or, in the case of anything Trump-related, extraordinarily depressing. So I really try to make it palatable. I don’t care if I had the same sort of take as someone else. I just want to make it feel fresh enough that you’re not going to immediately scroll away because you’re like, “Okay, I’m interested in this.” I’m trying to build people’s curiosity.

You’re building LNI with a social-first approach rather than trying to replicate the traditional newspaper model. What does that mean practically and how do you guard against the critique that social-first journalism optimizes engagement over importance?

I don’t want to sound like I’m just being like, “Well, it’s both.” But it is — it’s engagement and it’s important. And I think there’s also something about the way that people take in content. I don’t believe that younger people have shorter attention spans compared to older people. I think we all are getting shorter attention spans maybe, but it’s not a generational thing necessarily. I think overall what’s happening is that people are just getting their media in different ways. Maybe young people aren’t watching cable, but they are watching three-hour podcasts, right? Or listening to them.

And so that’s more of our approach. We are going to have a podcast as well as a newsletter that we’ve been doing. And the newsletter actually dives deeper into those stories. So there’s five short videos a week. And then every Thursday or Friday, depending on if you’re a paid subscriber, my colleague Chris Vasquez, writes a recap newsletter that dives deeper into all the subjects.

So for me, it’s really about get[ting] people to know about these stories, because I think a lot of our audience is — well, I know — it’s very young people. And on YouTube, it’s almost entirely men. And so in one way, we’re sort of this antidote to the Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate world. We’re kind of like this life raft of, “Here’s what’s going on over here in a more reasonable way, a rational way.” And then once we have them hooked there, we can be like, “Here’s a newsletter that gives you more information.” And then, hopefully at the beginning of next year, when we have a podcast out, there’s also a longer form that gets them in the weeds on this stuff in a way that’s not just about social-first and a quick 60-second grab and nothing else.

What’s the best journalistic career advice you’ve ever received?

I don’t know if I ever got this explicitly, but I saw it in their actions. I think the best journalists are generous journalists. And that can mean a lot of different things. That can just mean that they’ll find the time to talk to you if you need advice on something, but also they’re generous in their time and help with projects.

If I’m being a generous video journalist, for example, I will help a colleague out on a shoot where it might just be I’m helping them make sure the lighting’s good or helping the set or helping call ahead to make sure that we have the space that we need. Because in video journalism especially, there’s so many things that can happen at once, and if someone’s a head of a project and it’s not my project, but I can help out, I will. And I do think that paid off huge for me when TikTok launched — being generous — because all those people then gave back to me in different ways and helped the TikTok channel launch.

And the more current example of that is when I went independent, or was thinking about it, I reached out to all kinds of people like Cleo Abram, who gave me way too much of her time to talk about it. And Kara Swisher was extraordinarily generous in advice. So people I never would have thought would even want to talk to me, to be honest, just spent a lot of time giving me advice that was obviously very useful, but also just felt very thoughtful, like they really kind of cared about what was going on. That’s really nice to have.

What makes you hopeful about the future of journalism? Because it’s easy right now to feel kind of doom and gloom about things.

Right. Well, actually right there is something interesting because that sucks. I don’t want to sugarcoat that. But part of the Local News International concept is that every video — yesterday’s video, for example, I think I used six different sources. And I’m more of an explainer around video journalism. And at The Post, I could only really take sources from The Post. Most of the time that was fine, but sometimes I was like, “I really would like to pull from somewhere else when I’m talking about the story.” And so now I can do it from everywhere and all kinds of small, hyperlocal papers in some instances.

And so that gives me hope that journalism is still very effective worldwide. And hopefully I can use my sort of small social media perch over here to project some of what’s happening. And it’s that collaborative thing. Whether or not I’m working with them directly or not, we’re all kind of creating and explaining what’s happening in the world together. Journalism is still very powerful in that sense. So I’m hopeful in that way.

Obviously, there’s a lot of money flowing in different directions that can be a little bit scary in terms of journalism. But I feel like the other aspect, thinking of audience, my audience makes me feel more hope than any aspect of it. Just to get on my soapbox for just one second: When the Charlie Kirk killing, shooting, happened, I wrote in my newsletter about how there’s a lot of talk around young men and how unwell they are, which I think there’s a lot of evidence for. But I wrote in the newsletter, “I know a lot of you based off the stats that I get from YouTube and otherwise are young men. And my experience with the comment section is that you’re all very thoughtful people, at least the ones that comment. And that is something that I want to hear from you. Tell me how you’re doing.”

And I got hundreds of emails from people — from young men — and some of them were not doing well and they were very honest about it. And other ones were saying, “I’m not well, but I’m working on it or I’m seeing a therapist.” But there were a lot of different, more thoughtful comments and replies than I expected, even knowing the audience. And so that gave me hope, even as I felt sad for these people who are growing up in a world that was just very overwhelming and overstimulating. So the hope I get mostly is in the audience. And that’s really nice.

Further viewing from Dave Jorgenson:

• “Good news about climate change and the solutions that are working” (YouTube, Nov. 12, 2025)

• “Does the debt ceiling matter?” (YouTube, Feb. 4, 2025)

• “Here’s what happens if TikTok is really banned.” (TikTok, Jan. 10, 2025)

• “Washington state banned sales of assault weapons, including the AR-15.” (TikTok, Apr. 26, 2023)

• “The same but different.” (TikTok, Jan. 4, 2021)

Last spring, Brendan O’Meara made the fascinating move to offer a backstage pass into the publishing process of his latest book, The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine, even when doing so proved less than flattering. In his newsletter, Pitch Club, he broke down how his advance with a major publisher worked and laid out all the costs associated with completing his book. In doing so, O’Meara bravely shared data on the modest sales relative to his expectations and illuminated the impact of that on future opportunities with landing another book deal.

Why did he do this? Perhaps because, after hosting “The Creative Nonfiction Podcast” since 2013 and producing 499 episodes so far (with some of the top names in longform journalism and books including David Grann, Susan Orlean, and Patrick Radden Keefe) O’Meara knows the ins and outs of nonfiction publishing better than most. His struggle to break into journalism and book writing created enormous empathy for both starving journalists and for writers. Championing transparency while recounting his own professional experiences is no different than the efforts he’s put into learning about and sharing the career paths of hundreds of other writers on his podcast for the last 12 years.

Depth Perception spoke with Brendan O’Meara about his new book and assembling one of the most valuable repositories of conversations with writers that exists in the podcast space. — Brin-Jonathan Butler

One of the things that has fascinated me about your process after the release of The Front Runner, is your courage to be transparent about the whole process of your book deal, including the numbers involved and discussing the actual modest sales so far. What makes you want to be open about that on your Substack after suggesting the numbers aren’t meeting expectations?

I like being transparent about it because for so many years I was just so frustrated and bitter and resentful of the entire publishing ecosystem. And maybe even our peers. It just seemed like there was such a cloud over everything. I couldn’t get anything started. I couldn’t get any momentum.

That’s kind of why I started the podcast when I did, because I was just working through a lot of bitterness and jealousy of just seeing everybody else seemingly in “the club” and I was just outside looking in. A lot of that is because so much of the information just seems to be very, I don’t know, fenced off and walled off.

Book advances or book sales or just feeling crummy around all that kind of thing… Nonfiction book sales have been pretty sluggish this year in general. I like showing people the nuts and bolts, and if I can offer a little bit of light into the corner, I’m all for it.

As of this interview, you’ve done 499 episodes of “The Creative Nonfiction Podcast.” When you got a glowing review for the Prefontaine book in Publisher’s Weekly, what caught my eye was how the opening paragraph framed you as a podcaster who had written an “elegant biography.” You mentioned feeling some bitterness toward publishing, but what has jumped out to everyone I know about your podcast dealing with writers is how positive and supportive you are toward the people and the work you discuss. It’s generated a tremendous amount of goodwill. Why isn’t Publisher’s Weekly referring to your journalism and writing as opposed to your podcasting in discussing the creator of this book? Was that weird of them?

Yeah, it was. It’s so wild. I’m not a classically trained audio guy. If you saw my rig from 2013, when I was recording my earliest episodes, it was embarrassing. But I just taught myself how to do it. As I was saying earlier, those feelings of bitterness and jealousy, it was a fuel that wasn’t burning clean. And I was like, “You know, I need to be more celebratory of people and maybe in doing so, some of that goodwill will boomerang around to me eventually.” But that was never the intent.

The intent was recognizing there were a lot of people who were like me, with no one knocking on their door to have a conversation with them. So maybe I just need to build my own stage and invite people on who are on my level, which is to say pretty anonymous, but still have brilliant insights to offer. And then slowly from there, I saw maybe I could use this as bait to get some bigger fish. But to think I would be more identified as a podcaster versus a writer, which is probably where my ego wants to be more identified with — to be more identified by this very niche podcast in a discipline that is not my stock and trade?

[Podcasting] is just something that’s self-taught through trial and lots of error and lots of other trials. I just keep sticking around and keep showing up. More than anything else, it builds community. It curries good favor and it helps platform people who might not otherwise get that platform. It wasn’t until I started to try to serve other people, that good things started to happen to me.

Take a deep dive into immersive multimedia journalism

On a winter night in 2010, Alenka Artnik, sunken by grief, found herself alone on a bridge, contemplating suicide. Ten years later, she has become the world’s greatest female freediver and is getting stronger with each record-breaking plunge. Only a few people — all men — have dived deeper than she has on just one breath. And soon, she may surpass them all.

“The Depths She’ll Reach,” written by Xan Rice and filmed underwater by Daan Verhoeven, recounts how Artnik emerged from obscurity and mental health struggles to become one of the world’s most elite athletes.

Published 4 years ago this month, “The Depths She’ll Reach” was Long Lead’s first multimedia feature. Winner of the Webby Award and Webby People’s Choice Award for Best Sports Website, it was included in Triumph Books’s The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2022 and listed as a “Best of 2021” by Longreads, Longform, and The Browser — and it still holds up.

Read “The Depths She’ll Reach” today at thedepths.longlead.com.

When did you get your book deal for the Prefontaine book?

Early 2023.

This was your first major book deal, correct?

My first book came out in 2011 for a university press. But this was my first major book deal. There were 14 years between the two publications of each book.

This is something I think most people rarely get: a backstage pass into writers and publication of their books. You were very open about how advances for books function in publishing these days. Someone could sign a book deal for $100,000 and after taxes, agent fees, and the way advances are paid out in installments across many months — and even years — a writer could barely be living above the poverty line. It’s not like health insurance is included in the advance either. So what were your expectations going into publication for the Prefontaine book?

You come to realize that if a book deal was spread out over four years, a barista is making more money than some people with a book deal at a major publishing house. My advance for The Front Runner was $150,000. I shared that in my newsletter and broke everything down after fees and taxes.

I was definitely feeling a lot of heat and a lot of pressure for one, because I’m not a big name. I’m something of a “no name.” So coming into Prefontaine is just like, “Alright, I have to work really hard. I have to get really good interviews. I have to research thousands of articles and to get a really good shape on this so people can get beyond my name and sink into the story.”

I often talk about the 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. book panics of just waking up in the middle of the night and just thinking, “Can I come up with anything new?” There’s only so much that can be said about this guy. Am I just regurgitating everything that’s ever been said. Is Prefontaine’s sister going to run interference and tell people not to talk to me? All these little panics. So it was a pressure cooker type thing. Am I going to hit my word count that is in the contract? And then the question of whether I can say anything new and reach that word count.

When you finished the manuscript how did you feel? Did it land the way you were hoping it would?

I really liked how the short took shape with my editor. We were able to shape it into a way that felt like a really good story. [His] story almost plays like a hero’s journey. There’s the mythic Prefontaine who never gives up, but after his freshman year, he gave voice to quitting. He was so burned out.

And that was something you’ve never heard about Prefontaine. Pre asserted his voice on the track with a lot of hubris. Then he got humbled. Then he had to reckon with his hubris and also leveraged his platform and his celebrity to give others voice.

There were probably 10 to 12 rewrites of the manuscript in the final year before the book was published. But the rewrites helped bring the shape of the story into focus.

What’s it like writing a book about such an icon? He looks like the James Dean of athletes. He doesn’t just die tragically at the same age as James Dean, but also by the same means via a car crash. There’s a specific kind of legacy with legends who die young, it transforms into a double legacy, what they achieved alive and what they might have achieved had they lived.

When you’re doing the, for lack of a better term, the math of a book project, you start thinking about these mythic figures that have outsized proportionality in the culture. Can we find something new? What is the framing? Why do they matter? Why do they matter now? Can we get beyond that mythology?

That was a big hurdle with the reporting on Pre. I would get people on the phone and hear, “Hasn’t everything been said about this guy that can be said about him?” But it turns out he intersected with thousands of people.

So if you can get a fraction of those people who all had their little experience, now you can start to triangulate a more three-dimensional portrait and maybe get to something that hasn’t been said before. The hope is that maybe you can get to a greater sense of depth because there’s so much more perspective.

Your book made me think about the situation of writing about or making documentaries with another icon, Muhammad Ali. The vast majority of documentaries and books about Ali didn’t take off. Unlike, say, Michael Jordan, Ali stands out to me for being such a beloved figure and popular athlete who was simultaneously tremendously difficult to turn into a brand or have any brand cash in on him. What are Ali’s Air Jordans? The books and films that did succeed about Ali are almost always the exception rather than the rule. Prefontaine has had books and films about his life, why do some land and others fall off the map?

Yeah, it’s such a lottery. All we can do is lean into what excites us about the subject. And sometimes maybe what catches fire is just the timing. It’s luck. It’s the framing of it.

The original framing of The Front Runner was: Steve Prefontaine, “the dawn of the modern athlete.” That was the subtitle. That was the framing. Because he hasn’t changed much, but in the decades since so much has changed about this idea of the professionalization and branding of athletes.

Steve was on the vanguard of what we would call branding today. He just did it instinctually. Sometimes it’s just catching the zeitgeist at the right moment. And I think that writers, we just have to ground ourselves in the work. Do the best possible thing and assume it’s not going to do anything, but still write it with the idea that maybe it could catch fire and land in a hundred thousand hands — knowing full well that it might land in a thousand if we’re lucky.

Further reading and listening from Brendan O’Meara:

• The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine (Mariner Books, 2025)

• “The Creative Nonfiction Podcast” (2013–present)

• Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year (SUNY Press, 2011)

When Sarah Rogers pitched Long Lead a story about Twins Days, the world’s largest gathering of twins, she didn’t know exactly what shape it would take.

She knew she wanted to create a portrait series of twins — she’s a self-described fangirl of photographer Diane Arbus. She also had a personal connection to Twinsburg, Ohio, the town where Twin Days is hosted and where her maternal grandmother, herself a twin, was born. But the deeper story would reveal itself only once she and her longtime collaborator, Kate Bennis, arrived at the festival.

What emerged was “Double Meaning,” a multimedia feature combining Rogers’ intimate photography and reporting with Bennis’ documentary filmmaking. Published by Long Lead, the piece explores the 50th anniversary of Twins Days and the impact it’s had on the thousands of twins and multiples who attend every August. But it’s about more than matching outfits and genetic curiosities; it’s a meditation on human connection, community, and what twins might teach the rest of us about combating loneliness in an increasingly isolated world.

Rogers, a photojournalist and Long Lead‘s creative director, and Bennis, a documentary filmmaker and video journalist who grew up in Ohio with Twins Days always on her radar, have been friends and creative collaborators for over a decade. They met working at a summer camp media team in New York’s West Village, lived together for years, and even played in a band together. Their partnership on “Double Meaning” reflects that history: working independently but in sync, creating complementary pieces that enhance rather than duplicate each other.

Their feature balances celebration with complexity, featuring voices ranging from 5-year-olds to 89-year-olds. It touches on everything from body dysmorphia to grief while maintaining an underlying sense of wonder at the profound bonds twins share. In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Rogers and Bennis about their collaborative process, the challenges of weaving together celebratory and difficult themes, and what they learned about their craft by spending a long weekend in Twinsburg. —Parker Molloy

How did you first learn about Twins Days? Kate, you said you grew up around it, you’ve been aware of Twins Days the whole time?

Kate Bennis: I’ve always wanted to go, but I don’t have a twin. It was weird because I didn’t know anyone from Ohio who went, or I thought I didn’t. It never came up. But every year I’d be like, “Oh, that’s such a cool event. I bet that’s really fun to see in person.”

Then when we started working on this, all of these people came out of the woodwork and they were like, “Oh yeah, we go every year.” Friends I didn’t even realize were twins were just like, “Yeah, it’s our thing.”

What made you think this needs to be a Long Lead story? Sarah, were you involved in that since you’re the creative director of Long Lead?

Rogers: My maternal grandmother is a twin and she was born in Twinsburg. That was kind of a weird way that I knew about it. Then also the weird Ohio connection that I have with Kate — my mom’s side of the family’s from Ohio, so I just find myself there a lot. I kind of just had this in my periphery forever and was interested in it.

My grandmother told me she went when she was a kid when it was really just a very small parade through town and not much else. It was almost like a cookout in the park. But I always thought it was really interesting and it would be an interesting photo essay. That’s kind of how I initially pitched it — just being a Diane Arbus fangirl and wanting to do a portrait series of twins. Then trying to make it a bigger story about what twins have in common and what we can learn from twins. Also more broadly, what they have not in common.

Obviously, with everything being so polarizing right now, I thought it would be an interesting lens to look at these people that are genetically the same but have differences too. I kind of went into it not knowing the framing exactly yet. When I pitched it to [Long Lead editor John Patrick Pullen] initially, I was like, “I don’t know what this will be until I’m there.”

Kate and I independently worked on our projects. We were obviously reporting and interviewing the same people, but then she worked on the documentary, I worked on the written part, and we didn’t really compare notes until we had solid drafts. Then we realized these complement each other actually pretty well. There’s some overlap, but it’s not exactly the same either.

The piece moves seamlessly between celebratory aspects of Twins Days and deeper themes like loneliness, body dysmorphia, and grief. How did you decide to balance these tones in your reporting and your writing?

Rogers: I wanted this to be as much of a comprehensive look at the relationship between twins as possible, and obviously there’s good and bad there. I didn’t want this to be a fluff piece of just “being a twin is great, you have a built-in best friend,” even though we heard that soundbite a thousand times when talking to them.

I thought that offering some insight to aspects of being a twin that aren’t so obvious — like the body dysmorphia and being constantly compared and grief when you lose a twin and someone that you’ve spent your entire life with — those are all things that I didn’t know about before. I wanted to bring that into the reporting because I thought that was honestly some of the most interesting things that we took away from it.

You mention the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory about loneliness. When did that connection to broader public health issues occur to you — during the reporting or in the writing phase?

Rogers: It kind of came together in the writing phase. When I was working with the editor about this, he was really pushing me to connect the dots and make this more accessible to audiences that aren’t twins. Like, what can people that aren’t twins learn from the extremely strong bond of twins? What can resonate with a broader audience?

I was mapping out the takeaways from each interview. I had a wall of Post-its when I was working on this — it’s very Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the red string. I was basically trying to find common denominators that were across these sets of twins and problems that were being solved. One of them was companionship, and I was like, OK, that’s the solution to loneliness. This connection is kind of the opposite of the divisiveness and the polarization of everyone right now.

I wanted to connect the dots there. It is grim — the emotional and physical side effects of loneliness are pretty devastating. While the solution and the takeaway here isn’t just “everyone should be a twin,” I think that just having human relationships and bonds is super important for health and society.

What was the most challenging aspect of reporting this story?

Bennis: When I went into it, at first I kept telling Sarah my goal with the piece was to make someone wish they were a twin. It was lighter at first. But then I knew I wanted to touch base on the fact that they have a specific setup for twinless twins to meet up. … I [didn’t] know how it was going to fit into the piece because it’s been parades and festivals and costumes the whole time. It felt very meant to be. When we went up, it was this singular guy with his younger brother underneath the pavilion. His story was really powerful about losing his twin and how they did everything together.

For me, the biggest challenge was making it fit appropriately into this without totally changing the tone, but also without forcing it. I wanted it to be very much like, “This is so important for him still.”

We talked about that a lot. It was a long weekend. We shot a lot. I made Sarah go back because we wanted to do the unsanctioned twins events, like bowling and prom, that aren’t part of the festival officially. We shot 14 hours on Sunday or something. But when we went to [the] bowling [event], everybody that we talked to was there, including him. It was just really special to see him at that table, showing strangers pictures of his brother. Every part of the weekend was so important to him. I thought that was really cool.

I really liked the wall of people leaving notes to twinless twins. Sarah, were there any challenges that you faced?

Rogers: Tonally, just kind of weaving it together. I wanted to have the broader themes of community and friendship and companionship without it being a fluff piece. I wanted it to still have some weight to it. I think we got there.

You quote Keri Reese saying, “What’s it like not being a twin?” That’s a very thoughtful reversal of the usual question. Did that moment change how you thought about the story?

Rogers: For sure. I asked that question to pretty much all the sets of twins and a lot of them answered with that — “Well, it’s what we know, what’s it like not being a twin?”

It was interesting to not be a twin at Twins Days. When Kate and I were walking around, literally everyone there [was] a twin or with a set of twins — maybe another sibling or a child or some family member that wanted to attend. But it was an interesting flip of the coin to be the odd man out at a festival like that. For that weekend, they were the majority and that was a special community and feeling for them. Whereas every other time in their life, it’s more of a novelty to be a twin.

Did you coordinate with the festival organizers ahead of time or did you just kind of go in there and start interviewing people?

Rogers: We worked with the Twins Days media folks about getting media passes and shooting on the park grounds. But we weren’t able to shoot the studio portraits on location. So we actually set up shop at a hotel that was down the street from the park, which actually worked out really nicely because most of the twins were staying there. They were walking down to the breakfast buffet and we rented out a ballroom to do photo shoots, and people were just stopping in and talking to us.

The Twins Days folks were happy to have us shoot there, but we were also trying to make it more broadly about twins in general. That’s why we were checking out the unsanctioned Twins Days prom and bowling night as well, because we wanted to see twins outside of the park itself.

Kate, the piece includes several sets of twins who directly challenge stereotypes, like the sisters who say they don’t read each other’s minds. Were you actively looking for those counterpoints or did they volunteer it on their own?

Bennis: They all volunteered that. There were a few people who did say that they experienced twin telepathy and things like that, too. But yeah, they all were very much like, “This is a misconception, we don’t have this.” But then other people were very adamant that they do have this. That was funny.

You feature in this piece an age range from 5 years old to 89 years old. How did you approach interviewing subjects across such a wide age range differently?

Bennis: Once we set them up to take their photos, we got a feel of their energy and sort of went from there. We knew that with the wiggly twins, we weren’t going to get the deepest answers. As a 5-year-old, “What do you and your sister have in common?” As an 89-year-old, “What do you like about your sister still?” We tried to make it more relatable as we went through and tailored it.

There are several moments in the video where the twins finish each other’s sentences or speak in unison. Sarah, how did you decide how to show that in the text?

Rogers: It’s funny that you ask that because we just went through fact-checking and it was kind of a pain in the ass to figure out who said what because their voices are so similar. Thankfully, when Kate was shooting the video, we had lav mics on each twin. So we were literally going through the transcription and being like, “OK, based on the volume, I know this is this twin and this is this twin.”

There were still a couple of times that we had to go back to the video and ask Kate, “Can you please verify for the 30th time that this is this twin and this is this twin, because we want to get it right.” But yeah, it was tricky. Our managing editor found some elegant solutions to skirt the clunkiness of “this twin said this, then this twin interjected, then this twin said this.”

It’s charming in a video, but when you’re reading it, you’re like, “What is happening?” That was the most challenging thing in the fact-checking, copy editing stages of this piece.

Kate, what surprised you the most in the reporting that you didn’t expect going in?

Bennis: Overall, despite the ages of people and the different backgrounds and everything, obviously everyone was there because they wanted to be at the Twins Festival. But just the way that they all unanimously were like, “This is such a special connection that no one experiences with anyone else in their life.” I thought that was really interesting….

Just across the board, everyone was just like — I’m sure this isn’t obviously for everyone who’s a twin — “This is my soulmate. This is the person in my life who’s most important. Even if we get married, our relationship will never be as special as what I have with my sibling.”

I thought that was really wild. It didn’t matter: 76-year-old men or 10-year-olds or brothers in their thirties, every single one of them was like, “You’re the most important person in my life.” It was really special.

Sarah, was there anything in particular that surprised you?

Rogers: Yeah, I would say pretty much the same thing — that across demographics, it was very clear that that bond was unparalleled. To be fair, twins that don’t get along probably aren’t going to this festival together. But a lot of the twins that we talked to did spend a lot of time together, live together, whatever. Then some of them didn’t. Some of them lived in different towns and this was their weekend to connect. Those sets of twins had the same answers and the same closeness and the same speaking in unison as the twins that spent every waking hour together.

It was just a really beautiful community to see everybody finding comfort and knowing that everyone else there knows exactly the relationship that they have and they’re all on the same page. It was really special. It was very heartwarming. Kate and I choked up a couple of times when people were just talking about how much they love each other.

Three cheers! The Anthem Awards sing Long Lead’s praises

Long Lead is also excited to announce that our work has been honored with three 2025 Anthem Awards. The winning features are:

• The Age of Incarceration as a National Awareness Campaign for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion;

• Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet as a Podcast for Responsible Technology; and

• The Last Drops of Mexico City as News & Journalism for Sustainability, Environment & Climate.

Now in its fifth year, the Anthem Awards honor the purpose and mission-driven work of people, companies, and organizations worldwide. The awards amplify voices that spark global change and are a benchmark for social impact work.

Our goal at Long Lead is to produce journalism that is equal parts art and impact. This is the second consecutive year our features have been celebrated by the Anthem Awards. Last year, Home of the Brave took home two Anthem Awards and The Catch netted one.

Help Long Lead in its mission to promote what we call “journalism without compromise” by sharing our features online and off, and by telling people what you like about them. We’re leading the future of news, and by spreading the word, you’re a vital part of it.

What did doing this story teach each of you about your own craft that you’ll carry forward to future projects?

Bennis: I think about my filmmaking heroes or documentary heroes and how they went into things. I try to keep those in mind a lot when I’m doing a new project. Maya Deren was always taking the familiar and making it strange. I like that philosophy. Mary Ellen Mark did something at Twins Days almost 25 years ago. It was cool to see what we created versus how she went about it. It’s still this intimate lens into the lives of these people, and it’s off the cuff. I like that about it.

But throughout this project in particular, it was like, “What’s my intention behind making something?” For this one, the whole time I wanted it to feel like I’m letting someone in on a secret. I want people to be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about this before.” But then when they’re watching, they’re like, “Oh, I’m coming along and I didn’t realize this and I didn’t realize this.”

I think that’s how I want to approach future projects. You’re coming into this world and you think you know it, but it’s completely different than what you expected. Because that’s how I felt when we spent a weekend in Twinsburg together doing this project.

Rogers: I’m really drawn to documentaries and features on niche communities. I think they’re endlessly fascinating. That was kind of my initial launch point for wanting to do this piece. But as a journalist approaching it, I want to ask them all open-ended questions about their experiences and address different stereotypes and things like that.

But I also think that often the most interesting soundbites come from just asking, “What am I not asking? What don’t I know about being a twin that I should know?” Incorporating that question always yields the most interesting stuff because obviously you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s how we got into the conversation about body dysmorphia and things like that.

This was just a good reminder of letting subjects talk and share their experiences and not going in too strongly with what you want the piece to be… That yields the most interesting results.

Further reading from Sarah Rogers:

• “‘You Will Find God’: Inside the Battle to Ban Conversion Therapy in Florida” (The Daily Beast, Sep. 27, 2019)

• “Stonewall 50: 50 Faces, 50 Stories, From New York City’s LGBT World Pride” (with Tim Teeman and Justin Miller, The Daily Beast, July 1, 2019)

• “Why I Left NYC in Springtime for 10° Days on the Arctic Ocean” (The Daily Beast, May 4, 2019)

• “The Volunteers Guarding Kentucky’s Last Abortion Clinic” (The Daily Beast, Sep. 8, 2018)

• “Could Kentucky Become the First State Without an Abortion Clinic?” (The Daily Beast, Sep. 11, 2018)

Further viewing from Kate Bennis:

• “How this Rockette and Mom of Four Gets it Done” (Good Housekeeping, Apr. 16, 2019)

• “Rachel Butler Shares the Story of When Her Husband Tried to Murder Her” (Good Housekeeping, Oct. 16, 2018)

• “Fruit & Veggie Cutting Tools You Never Knew You Needed” (Good Housekeeping, Sep. 28, 2017)

• “Rooftop Tiny Home” (House Beautiful, July 29, 2017)

• “Chow: Hannibal Buress of Broad City Teaches Nylon Guys How to Cook…An Egg” (Nylon, Apr. 16, 2014)

Jennifer Dulos was last seen on May 24, 2019 after dropping her children off at school in New Canaan, Connecticut. She had been in the middle of a horrendously nasty divorce, which caused suspicion to turn to her estranged husband, Fotis Dulos. Surveillance footage appeared to have caught him dumping bloody trash in a nearby town, leading to his and his new girlfriend’s arrests in connection with Jennifer’s disappearance.

Legendary editor Graydon Carter, wanted to cover the ordeal in his splashy, new weekly journal Air Mail, and reached out to veteran journalist and author Rich Cohen, who has written everything from Jewish gangsters to pee-wee hockey dads and just so happened to live near Jennifer’s town. Cohen turned him down.

Jennifer’s story had drawn extensive coverage across the United States, which some criticized on the basis of “missing white woman syndrome.” While victims from less elite socioeconomic and other racial backgrounds stirred little interest, a wealthy suburbanite created a media obsession. Besides, Cohen had never written true crime before.

But Cohen had first heard about Jennifer’s story from other parents and changed his mind about Carter’s proposal when he began to see an uncanny overlap between her story and his own friends’ lives. “Her background was so close to my own,” says Cohen. “I felt like I understood her. I felt that despite being covered, she was not really covered.”

Cohen’s approach to covering Jennifer’s story was to steer his readers away from the tabloid headlines and instead focus on the tragic disintegration of a marriage and the privileged and troubled life she led before meeting her husband.

Fotis died by suicide on the day he was supposed to report to court, on January 30, 2020. Cohen’s Air Mail story — or at least the first of its whopping six parts — published just over a week later.

This edition of Depth Perception explores how Cohen, despite not being a crime writer, took on this story, which is now the subject of his 14th book, Murder In the Dollhouse: The Jennifer Dulos Story. —Brin-Jonathan Butler

This is a book where, I think for the first time, anyone I’ve recommended it to has ripped through it in a few days. They’re all hooked. Granted, I don’t live far from the town where this story takes place and the people I’ve recommended it to have mostly lived in Fairfield county. What have you made of the response so far?

Overall, it’s gotten really positive reviews. I don’t think of myself as existing in any genre. I write a story. Some people who are into true crime expect certain conventions. One is a lot about murder itself, a lot about the blood and the gore. I’m not really interested in that. I’m interested in Jennifer Farber Dulos as a person and how she got herself in this situation where she was basically at the mercy of a psychopath.

You make the point in your introduction about “missing white woman syndrome” and the conventions of the true crime genre. Your approach reminded me a great deal about how David Lynch explored the genre in “Twin Peaks.” “Twin Peaks” didn’t center around who killed Laura Palmer so much as who was Laura Palmer and what has her loss inflicted on her friends and family and community. Her identity is explored through grief. As someone who isn’t a crime writer, how did you calibrate your approach to telling this story?

When I think about true crime, I think about great books that are later called true crime. The genre right now hasn’t done so well in the last few years in a lot of areas. It’s not quality writing. When I think about true crime, I think about great novels like Crime and Punishment or obviously Truman Capote with In Cold Blood.

But it’s weird, In Cold Blood might not satisfy a lot of people right now because it’s really about the family and the whole beginning of the book is making those people, the Clutter family, real. It’s about the last day of their lives, about their dreams, their lives, and where they came from. For me, that’s the only way that the murders register as the sort of horrible, horrible evils that they are. You have to know who the people are. You have to take something that is just a prop in a newspaper story or a dead woman in a photograph from a crime scene and make these people real again.

Coming soon: Long Lead presents its latest feature

Since 2021, Long Lead has reinvented features journalism with an immersive approach to longform news that has turned heads and had tremendous impact, such as championing a class-action lawsuit of unhoused veterans, platforming victims of gun violence, and preserving the history unjustly incarcerated Americans, to name a few highlights.

To date, Long Lead features have also roused critics. In the four years since our launch, our work has won an Edward R. Murrow Award, a RFK Human Rights Journalism prize, a Peabody Award nomination, two National Magazine Award nods, and plenty of other honors, including seven Webby Awards.

Later this month, the latest Long Lead feature — a rare tale of community and togetherness in these divisive times — will be released. Be the first to experience it by subscribing to the Long Lead newsletter here:

Long Lead

Updates and behind-the-scenes reporting on Long Lead's award-winning, longform journalism

One element of the story you focused on that I found fascinating was how, with all the money Jennifer Dulos had and the protection it offered, ultimately she was still terribly exposed to her estranged husband. The money itself not only failed to protect her, it actually put a target on her back and endangered her.

One of the tragedies of this case, and what interested me a great deal, was how you can see it coming from a million miles away. It’s an avoidable tragedy. And yet nobody can seem to stop it. A lot of our lives and a lot of things that happen are like that. It’s very stoppable but no one can figure out how. Tom Wolfe wrote about the idea that everything was about status. I think there’s a lot of truth to that with everyone either moving up or moving down. Everybody’s worried about what’s going to happen and are they going to move up or fall down. I think it’s a projection of anxiety. We end up fighting for things that don’t really matter, missing the big picture, getting caught up in petty fights that become the whole world when you really should just move on.

Right now, sometimes it unfortunately seems like a zero-sum game in America where somebody wins and somebody has to lose. For me to have more, someone else has to have less and that just creates a tremendous amount of anxiety. You saw that in the marriage between Jennifer and her husband.

How did you begin to identify with Jennifer learning about her case?

Her background was so close to my own. She had a lot more money than I did. But where she grew up, her age, how she was created culturally by pop culture, and her dreams of being a writer too. She was a very good playwright. I felt like I understood her. I felt that despite being covered, she was not really covered. Then I discovered that we overlapped a lot in our friendships. That was just because we did come from the same early ‘90s New York writer’s world.

One aspect of the story I found particularly fascinating was how Jennifer navigated her Jewish identity throughout her life. You provided such a nuanced context to that situation generationally in American life. Can you speak to how you dealt with that in her story?

When you’re Jewish — and it’s not just Jews, it’s a lot of people — a lot of people think they know you. They have preconceived notions of what a Jewish person is like, even if they’ve never met a Jewish person. And that is a horrible way to sort of go through life to be judged in that way. So I think there can be a strong desire to escape from that unless you’re a really religious person. You don’t want to be ghettoized. I think Jennifer idealized a kind of waspy ideal. I think Jennifer was very much a product of her time of wanting to be judged on her own merits and not on her religion. She saw it as something to escape, like a lot of us did.

Okay, let’s change gears. Occasionally we ask experienced journalists a range of questions to see what gems they have to share. First up: What’s the purpose of journalism?

To let you know what’s really going on and deepen your sense of the world as you make your way, slowly or quickly, toward the big black void.

What’s one app/tool/service you cannot do your work without?

I believe, if forced to, a writer can always work as long as he or she has access to paper and pen. See [Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn.

Which story of yours are you the proudest?

Maybe a humor piece I wrote for the Believer called, “The Gospel According to His Good Friend Dennis.”

Which story of yours do you most regret?

The same. It really hurt Dennis’s feelings.

What’s the best journalistic career advice you ever received?

“Sit down and write the story as if you were writing a letter to me.” That was from my friend Alec Wilkinson when I was in my early 20s.

What’s the worst journalistic career advice you ever received?

“Do it this way and you’ll make serious bank.”

Journalism school: yea or nay?

Not for me. But there are at least a dozen paths to the waterfall.

What’s your worst writing habit?

Making my family listen to everything I write before it’s finished.

What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

The Seabreeze, a paper my kids and their friends and their friends’ friends revived in Northport, Maine — it went under in, like, 1899. They have now published five issues and it has been devoured by the local community, which shows the never-ending hunger for hyper-local news.

What makes you think journalism is doomed?

The fact that so many people comment on a story without reading it — not good.

What’s the best media party you ever attended?

The best media event for me was probably The Forward newspaper’s Christmas party at Mo Pitkin’s in the East Village in 2005 or so. I spotted a picture of my parents in a group shot at a wedding outside the bathroom and discovered that the real Mo Pitkin was my great great uncle — that’s why the name resonated when I saw the invite — and that the owner, Jesse Hartman, was my second cousin.

Which of your articles should be made into a movie?

“The Gospel According to His Good Friend Dennis.”

Why did you become a journalist?

Junior year in high school as a reporter for the New Trier News in Winnetka, Illinois. The HAM radio club was my first beat.

Who should we talk to next? Who do you want to answer these questions?

David Lipsky, Rolling Stone reporter, partner on the old time RS HOT LIST, and author of many excellent books, including, most recently, The Parrot and the Igloo. Though played by Jesse Eisenberg in the movie “The End of the Tour,” Lipsky is, in fact, much better looking. It’s a rare instance of the real person being more physically attractive than the avatar.

What is a story/book/movie/podcast that you wish you created or wrote?

“Apollo 10 ½.” Richard Linklater gets every memory of my childhood in there.

What longform nonfiction writer do you envy the most?

I envy no man for I do not know the hard truth of any other life. I admire many, including David Lipsky, Darin Straus, Jamaica Kincaid, Alec Wilkinson, Lili Anolik, Dani Shapiro, and Ian Frazier.

What would you do if you didn’t have this career?

Make millions on Wall Street.

Do you have a favorite internet rabbit hole that is NOT part of your beat?

UFOs.

Further reading from Rich Cohen:

• “The Gospel According to His Good Friend Dennis” (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, January 12, 2010)

• “Are We All Living in a Simulation?” (The Paris Review, October 2, 2019)

• “The Rise and Fall of Rolling Stone” (The Atlantic, December 15, 2017))

• “Sexist Pigs Might Fly” (Air Mail, April 29, 2023)

• “U.F.O.’s Exist. No, Really!” (Air Mail, July 15, 2023)

• Always Be Suspicious of the ‘Cool Mom’” (Air Mail, February 26, 2022)