When journalist Matt Taibbi sued Eoin Higgins for defamation, the offending words were sitting right there on the cover: “Owned” and “Bought.” Higgins’ book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, argues that a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires pulled a generation of once-left-leaning independent journalists rightward, with Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald as the central case studies. Taibbi’s theory was that calling him “owned” was a literal, false claim that he’d been purchased. In May, a federal judge dismissed the suit with prejudice, finding that the words were obvious rhetoric rather than statements of fact.

Higgins is a journalist and historian from the Berkshires who came up through the scrappy left-leaning outlets of the 2010s — places like CounterPunch, FAIR, The Outline, and Splinter, most of which no longer exist. A high school dropout, he didn’t go to college for a decade, and then cut his teeth doing local reporting in western Massachusetts. He broke stories on the Alex Morse primary and the Boston Police Department for The Intercept and The Appeal before publishing his first book, Owned, in 2025. Now he’s turned the lawsuit against him into a kind of cause: He and his publisher are seeking $178,000 in attorney’s fees, and he’s been making the argument for a federal anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statute.

“The point is not to win,” he says of the lawsuits and threats aimed at journalists by Taibbi, Kash Patel, Donald Trump, and others. “The point is to shut you up.” In this edition of Depth Perception, we talk with Higgins about coming up in a dying media ecosystem, why he refuses to write for free, and what it’s like to be sued over a metaphor. —Parker Molloy

Let’s start with your background. Where are you from, where are you now, and why did you become a journalist?

I live in Maine now and I’m originally from western Massachusetts, the Berkshires, which is a very rural, artsy area. It’s kind of called Hamptons North for New York City, a real upstairs-downstairs kind of place. I’ve lived on the West Coast, in the South, in the Midwest, in New York City, but I’ve arrived back in New England after many years.

I didn’t go to college for about 10 years after leaving school at 17, so I had 10 years of a lot of different life experiences: living all over the place, going to a lot of shows, trying my hand at being a DJ. Then I went back to school, to the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. After that, there was a family tragedy, so I moved to New York and ended up going to Fordham University to get a master’s in U.S. history. And you can’t really do anything with that.

I was kind of spinning my wheels and I applied for a job doing secretarial work at a local publication [in the Berkshires]. Then I went on vacation for a couple of weeks … [and] when we got back, there was a message asking if I’d like to come in and try to become a reporter. I’d been blogging a little at that point because my wife had basically said, “You need to do something, you can’t just sit around the house.” So I’d started doing that to occupy my time. And I decided, yeah, I’ll try to be a reporter, I’ll see how it goes.

So I did local reporting in the Berkshires for a couple of years, but at the same time I was also blogging and starting the freelance life. This was 2015-2016, which, as you’ll remember, was a very entertaining time to be on Twitter and to be writing about politics. So I was at the center of this perfect storm for the online stuff, but I also had the advantage of training in journalism at the local level. Local reporting is a very specific skill set and it translates to the more national stuff I do now. It’s really nuts and bolts, and that’s how you learn and since then I’ve just worked for a bunch of different places, and now I am where I am.

A lot of your early bylines ran through CounterPunch, FAIR, Common Dreams, The Outline, Splinter, Deadspin, basically the left-of-mainstream, alt-media circuit of the 2010s, much of which doesn’t exist anymore. What did coming up in that ecosystem teach you?

They all taught me different things. I have to cite CounterPunch because they were the first people to publish anything outside of my own blog. From the beginning I made a promise to myself: I’m not going to write for other people for free. But if I blog something on my site and somebody wants to republish it, that’s fine. And that’s what CounterPunch did. I cold-pitched them and they started running a lot of my stuff, which helped me develop a profile. So I always have to give it up to them. They’ve been longtime supporters, I’m still in contact with them, and they publish a broad range of views for people on the left. Some of what they publish I don’t agree with, and some of it I do, but it’s good to have a place where you can read all of that.

The Outline came a little later. They’re no longer around, but they were a great publication to write for — really interesting design, interesting pitches and ideas. The editor I worked with there, Leah Finnegan, was a great technical editor who punched my stuff up really well. Every time I worked with a different editor, I’d learn something. Of the [outlets] you mentioned, I’d also say Jim Naureckas at FAIR, which is still around and has been for over 30 years. He’s one of the greatest editors I’ve ever worked with, just makes your stuff so much better. Both he and Janine [Jackson] there are really great.

So on the technical side, I learned a lot from those editors. I learned how to pitch, and I learned a lot about getting rejected and that being okay. You have to have a really thick skin doing freelance. You’re throwing something out to 10 different places and they might all say no, and then you have to think of something different. Or you have a great idea and you send it out, but 10 minutes earlier somebody had almost the exact same one, and theirs gets published first. It’s a relentless churn.

Any writer who tells you they’re not still learning from editors, well, there are some writers like that, and you can see their work just doesn’t stay as sharp. It starts to decline. So that’s actually one of the more important things I learned.

Long Shadow podcast: How Elon Musk broke the internet

The final episode of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet illuminates how Elon Musk, enraged by the COVID shutdowns, became radicalized by his own Twitter feed. A habitual user of social media, he becomes convinced that the systemic suppression of speech that he sees on Twitter is inhibiting humanity — and it’s crucial that he step in to buy the site in order to save mankind.

It’s a wild finale that explores how a toxic army of trolls goes after women in the gaming industry, giving birth to an online movement of disaffected men. This “manosphere” (and Musk’s support) contributes to the resurgence of Donald Trump and a constitutional crisis that holds American democracy in the balance.

Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?” The three-time Signal Award-winning podcast is out now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Your book, Owned, traces how Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi shifted right after going independent, and Taibbi ended up suing you over it. Can you tell me about the book itself, and about the lawsuit? Why did he sue you, and what happened?

The book makes an argument about the infusion of tech money into independent media and how that’s driven the space to the right: the motivations behind it, the ideological and political reasons the tech sector ended up where it is now, at least openly. I think it was always kind of there. It mostly traces Greenwald’s career, and Taibbi’s a little bit too. Taibbi pops up in the second half. These are two guys who shifted to the right, and the book looks at the different incentives and the different ideological reasons they may have gotten there, and tries to offer a nuanced picture of why. People are interested in how these guys ended up this way.

Glenn makes up the biggest share of the book, as far as tracing one person’s career, and I’ll freely admit the portrait of Glenn is a lot more nuanced. We talked for hours. He gave me a full interview, let me ask him whatever I wanted. He was cordial and reasonable. We had some disagreements during the conversation, that was fine, and we still have a lot of disagreements — we still snipe at each other online — but it was a personally fine discussion. Matt said, “I’ll pass,” and then basically told me not to contact him again when I followed up.

So the book came out, and Glenn has acknowledged its existence maybe twice or three times, because Glenn is smarter than Matt is. Matt got really mad about it and sued me, in part for not talking to him before publication, which was in the lawsuit, even though I reached out to him, he said no, and I included all of his denials in the book. I also include a lot of his own writing and commentary. For the lawsuit he took the cover, the flap copy, the promo copy, and a few parts of the book so dishonestly out of context, including my favorite one, where I say he cashed in his well-earned reputation in order to get the Twitter Files. Matt tried to argue that “cashed in” meant he was making money, when it explicitly did not.

So that’s the case. Initially it was very weakly written. They amended the complaint and it was a little stronger, but it still just didn’t hold up, and the judge dismissed it with prejudice. (Editor’s note: Taibbi has since filed to appeal this ruling.) Now we’re going for lawyer’s fees under anti-SLAPP law, which has an uneven application within the federal system, and that’s why he filed in federal court and not state court. I don’t know that for a fact, but, come on.

The way I look at it: First, Hachette and I shouldn’t have to pay attorney’s fees for this bullshit. Second, on principle, this should be costly to him. I don’t want him to keep doing it, and I don’t think it’s ethically correct. I think it’s a violation of journalistic ethics and of the free-speech advocacy he claims to have. And third, anything that adds to case law endorsing a federal anti-SLAPP statute is good.

I wrote a piece for The Intercept in April about Kash Patel trying to sue The Atlantic, using that as the framing device, before the judgment came down, to make the case that there should be a federal anti-SLAPP statute. So that’s become a bit of a passion project for me now.

In that Intercept piece on Kash Patel suing The Atlantic, you put your own case in a list that includes Trump v. CNN, Trump v. ABC, Trump v. Paramount, and Musk v. Media Matters. What’s the pattern people miss when they cover these as one-off feuds instead of coordinated attacks?

It’s totally what the right does to silence people. Although there’s a distinction to make. Trump is trying to get bribed, basically. That’s what he’s doing. But they’re all trying to send the message that if you criticize us, we’ll make it cost money. They’re not even necessarily trying to win so much as trying to make it cost money and time and stress.

So I’d almost segment off Kash Patel and Trump going after big publications, and put myself and Taibbi more in another category. Another thing: These complaints are meritless and frivolous, but the U.S. legal system still allows them to go through, which, to be clear, it should. I’m not saying a lawsuit shouldn’t be able to go through the courts. What I’m saying is that with a federal anti-SLAPP law, if you do this and you lose and it’s found to be frivolous bullshit, then you’re on the hook for the damages you were asking for and for the attorney’s fees, because it can’t be free. Right now, we’re asking for $178,000 in fees, which is what our attorneys cost, because they’re very good. That’s a lot of money to somebody like me. It’s not a lot to somebody like Taibbi, but it’s not nothing to him either. I wish we could sue him for a lot more, I wish we could make it a cost-prohibitive experience for him, but I don’t know how possible that is under the law right now.

The Patel case is a good example of how this is spreading on the right. He’s suing The Atlantic for $250 million, which is insane. He’s never going to get that, even if his claim were found to have merit, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to file a real number or a real complaint. His complaint against The Atlantic is so blatantly over the top, partly because he lacks even the slightest subtlety. In the Patel complaint he explicitly says, “I told you this wasn’t true and you still published it,” which perfectly explains how these guys think about it.

Further reading from Eoin Higgins:

• Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left (Bold Type Books, February 2025)

• “Matt Taibbi filed a Trumpian, free speech-chilling lawsuit against me. A judge just threw it out.” (MS NOW, May 7, 2026)

• “Kash Patel Suing The Atlantic Is a MAGA Anti-Free Speech Tactic” (The Intercept, April 23, 2026)

• “New Videos Show Massachusetts Cops Brutalizing George Floyd Protesters” (The Appeal, February 9, 2021)

• “Party Leaders Investigating Anti-Morse Campaign Helped Orchestrate It” (with Daniel Boguslaw and Ryan Grim, The Intercept, August 14, 2020)

Investigative reporter Jessica Lussenhop felt she was just hitting her stride at ProPublica when the email showed up in her inbox: “Are you the voice of ProPublica?”

“That is a very heady idea,” said Lussenhop. The much-lauded nonprofit news organization was finally going to launch its long-considered podcast and the showrunners were on the hunt for a host.

Lussenhop, then four years into her tenure in the newsroom’s Midwestern bureau, had just finished one of the biggest stories of her career. A longtime print reporter before joining ProPublica, she signed on with the Pulitzer-winning organization to build her investigative chops. Things were going well.

Shifting to podcast host would put an end to her investigative work. But it would allow her to indulge in some of her other passions: geeking out about reporting and working in audio. Lussenhop was already familiar with the audio medium having done a fellowship at This American Life in 2019. So she applied.

The show, Paper Trail, launched on May 14, 2026. In each episode, Lussenhop and a ProPublica reporter detail a previously published investigation from the site. The stories vary widely but the episodes are stitched together by a very specific thread: explaining what it takes to do investigative reporting.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we ask Lussenhop about the goals for the show, why Paper Trail has made her more hopeful, and how her work as a reporter has changed her view on some of journalism’s oldest rules. —Jenna Schnuer

I know so many reporters who want to work at ProPublica. How did you get started there?

I had applied for other jobs at ProPublica but hadn’t been successful. Then they had this opening on their Midwest team, and I’m from Minnesota. It just felt a bit like this actually could be my job. I understood even before I got here how much ProPublica is a really mission-driven place. It was a chance to sort of fortify the investigative reporting scene in my home state and cover a community that I grew up in and would like to give back to.

That meant leaving the chance at doing audio work behind for a while. You were OK with that?

During the interview process they put you in a panel conversation with the other reporters in the bureau. Melissa Sanchez, who I’m very lucky to now call a friend, was in that panel, and I remember she asked me, “You’ve been working a lot in audio, and if you come to ProPublica, you’re not going to do that. How do you feel about that?”

I think what I wound up saying to her was, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this decision. I think what I’ve learned is that podcasting is actually more about almost making art and the mission driven work at ProPublica is about making a difference. So I feel like I’ve got a choice: I can make a difference or I can make art. I feel more strongly about doing this [difference-making] work.”

I had the opportunity to jam my foot in the door and force them to teach me how to be a real investigative reporter. That, to me, felt more valuable to my future. But I very explicitly was like, “If I never touch audio again, I’m OK with that.”

Did it ever come up again early on at the job?

When I got hired, during my first trip to the New York office, I had a conversation with my now boss, Ginger Thompson, and she clearly had a glint in her eye about making a podcast. She was like, “Oh, you have this experience. What do you think about making a podcast, or would you want to be involved?”

I probably was too glibly kind of like, “No, I don’t think so. I really want to concentrate on building up my investigative skills.”

Tell me about hosting Paper Trail. What’s it like?

I don’t even think I realized how much I like talking about the craft. I just like talking about the nuts and bolts [of journalism and reporting a story]. I really want to hear the whole story from start to finish. I don’t think that it’s just because I’m a journalist and I’m a wonk about this stuff. My job now, really, is to sit in the role of the listener too. It demystifies the whole thing and makes it so you can wrap your head around this whole investigative thing we do here, which sounds really fancy and impenetrable. It’s actually not. It’s just asking questions, asking uncomfortable questions, and being really persistent. Then relying on your colleagues to help you when you don’t know quite what to do next. So I’ve been enjoying the hell out of just talking to people about, “How did you do this?”

And when I ask those questions, it is coming from a very genuine place of “please help me understand this.” My colleagues have done things that I, in a million years, would never have and take big swings that I would never have had the audacity to think I could do. And then after I talked to them, I’m like, “Well, maybe I could.”

That is also something I want to share with the audience. This doesn’t have to feel so mysterious. Not everybody aspires to be a journalist, but [I want] to inspire people to be engaged with the world around them and some of the troubling things that maybe you notice around you. Rather than sort of shrug your shoulders and feel powerless about it, if you want to get your own information and, I don’t know, feed us some of that information, you too can effectuate change. Sometimes that sounds a little Pollyannaish and maybe a little too optimistic, but I actually believe it.

An epic government scandal hiding in plain sight

A multi-part, multimedia feature on West LA’s unhoused veteran’s crisis, Home of the Brave, chronicles a land grab dating back to the U.S. Civil War, bursting with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death. At its core, the feature seeks to answer the question: Why are veterans living in the street?

The National Magazine Award-finalist feature takes readers from 1888, when wealthy landowners donated prime Los Angeles real estate to the U.S. government to house military veterans, to the present day, as modern vets are fighing the federal government for housing on that land. The 388-acre property abuts the Brentwood neighborhood and the UCLA campus, is some of the country’s most valuable real estate, and houses very few vets — many in tiny, temporary shelters. Meanwhile, L.A. has become the homeless veteran capital of America.

Why isn’t this land, which once housed thousands of disabled soldiers, home to more veterans? The answer is a scandal in plain sight. Read Home of the Brave today and subscribe to the Home of the Brave newsletter for the latest updates.

How do you decide which piece you’re going to focus on for each episode?

We get to pick from this glorious catalog of amazing journalism. We decide based on various factors like, is this going to be a good one for audio? We really need to pull listeners in and get them invested in us. So we’re looking for stories where the reporter is a really great storyteller. Or the story itself has a great narrative. Maybe in the reporting process they’ve pulled a lot of documentation that’s in audio form that we can play on the radio that really brings the whole investigation to life.

And then there’s just also factoring in the full life cycle of a ProPublica story, going from we publish a story [to] something in the world changes. We talked in the trailer a lot about trying to see investigative journalism as a work of optimism. We write [follow-up] stories every time our investigations have impact but I don’t know that readers are connecting all those dots because that impact can take years and years and years.

[On Paper Trail] we can show the full life cycle of a ProPublica story through [an] episode. We can show that this journalism changed the world in real life.

What are you going for with the tone of the show?

It should feel like you are having a conversation about something in the news with a friend at a bar. There’s nothing I love more than discussing journalism over a drink. I just love talking about this stuff.

What’s your usual drink of choice for these conversations?

Oh my goodness, I’m a millennial dirtbag so I drink a lot of IPAs.

The public’s trust in journalism is not in a great place right now. How do you think your show can help rebuild trust?

It’s not like I’m sneaking vegetables into the storytelling or anything. And the worst thing for this show would be if it ever felt preachy. I don’t want people to feel we’re [saying], “Well, we know what’s really going on, and this is how we did it, and you’re going to listen and pay attention.” We want to deliver it in this way that’s organic. We like to have a little bit of a light touch with it.

Again, I’m a geek about this stuff. Sometimes in these conversations, I will go down a really wonky rabbit hole and then my producers will [tap] me on the shoulder like, “Pull up the plane. You’re just nose diving into journalism-inside baseball.”

Give me an example of how you explained some aspect of journalism without going too wonky.

There was a moment in our second episode, what I’ve been calling a towing scandal. One of the people who really helped those reporters get that project off the ground was a source inside of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles, and it was a source they had to keep anonymous.

I think that everybody knows that journalists have anonymous sources. But when people don’t trust journalists, [an anonymous source probably] feels weird and creepy. And if you don’t trust the institution to begin with, why on earth would you give that [source] any weight?

I liked that we got the opportunity to be like, “OK, here’s how they figured out what was going on.” They had a DMV source. But then, Dave Altimari, the reporter at the Connecticut Mirror, very plainly [explained that the source] could have gotten in trouble for helping. [That source] was the only person who could be like, “Hey, here’s how this towing system works.” If his name [was] in the newspaper, he might have gotten fired.

I mean, everybody understands that. We all have jobs and want to keep them. It’s something so basic. When we keep people anonymous, we do it for a reason. And I love the opportunity to [explain the] “here’s why.”

Do you think working as an investigative reporter at ProPublica helps you in your role as host of the show?

It helps me, as a host, bring that authentic and genuine excitement and thrill of discovery that comes with investigative journalism. The fun of investigative journalism is that there’s like a secret around a corner. You get to shine a light into that corner, and when that happens, it’s just magical. To have done that myself quietly off on my own doing my reporting by myself, so it’s fun to commune on the mic with my fellow reporters about those moments. I think you can hear it in our voice. In the first episode, people keep pointing this out to me, I yelled, “Holy shit,” because that was a holy shit moment. I really meant it because I just feel in my stomach and in my toes when you get to these moments. I feel really genuinely excited to get to try to share how that feels with people.

Further reading and listening from Jessica Lussenhop:

• “Paper Trail: A Podcast About Following the Evidence” (ProPublica, Launched May 14, 2026)

• “Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.” (ProPublica co-published with The Minnesota Star Tribune, November 20, 2025)

• “A Doctor Challenged the Opinion of a Powerful Child Abuse Specialist. Then He Lost His Job.” (ProPublica co-published with APM Reports, June 30, 2025)

• “‘A Wholly Inaccurate Picture’: Reality Cop Show ‘The First 48’ and the Wrongly Convicted Man” (ProPublica, March 29, 2025)

• “It Looks Like the Railroad Is Asking for You to Say Thank You” (ProPublica, December 19, 2023)

• “Do You Hear What I Hear?” (This American Life, March 13, 2020)

Two-time National Magazine Award winner Tom Junod begins his father-son memoir at his father’s memorial service 20 years ago. He confesses that the primary motivation for his celebrated journalism career was, in fact, the same motivation he felt when delivering his eulogy for his father: having the last word.

Looking at the urn holding his father’s ashes, Junod writes he was “stunned into silence by the spectacle of the genie squeezed back into the bottle.” Junod spent 10 years forensically investigating his father’s life. “Big Lou” Junod returned to Wantagh, Long Island after serving in World War II. He dreamed of becoming Frank Sinatra. While failing to make it as a crooner, Lou became a highly successful traveling women’s handbag salesman. He poured his energy into molding his role in the world after Sinatra, living his life as if a big time celebrity.

The memoir uncovers endless extramarital affairs, a secret second family, a hidden half-sister, a father with double — and even triple — lives. Junod excavates a cemetery’s worth of skeletons in his father’s closet. In the process, he learned that this project consumed his entire life, long before his publishing career began. The memoir also deals with Junod wrestling with his father’s conception of masculinity and his struggles to both live up to it and unlearn it.

Junod is the only writer to win the National Magazine Award for feature writing in back-to-back years. Both profiles were written for GQ: the first dealt with an abortion doctor, the second profiled a rapist. “Can You Say… Hero?,” his exploration of Fred Rogers written for Esquire, stands as one of the finest profiles ever written and was adapted into the 2019 film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” starring Tom Hanks.

As one of the highest decorated journalists to write for Esquire or GQ — among a class of greats like James Baldwin, Nora Ephron, Richard Ben Cramer, Joan Didion, and F. Scott Fitzgerald — the one thing differentiating him was that he’d never written a book.

He wrote about his father 30 years ago for GQ in “My Father’s Fashion Tips.” The adoring portrait belied both who his father was and Junod’s true feelings for him. After reading the article, Junod’s mother cooly remarked, “Don’t forget who raised you, kid.” His new book is both a reckoning and mea culpa to Junod’s mother’s rebuke of that article. “There were always secrets,” Junod wrote of dad in that article, 30 years before publishing the memoir. “But I loved you,” he writes near the end of the book, “in order to survive you.”

Depth Perception speaks with Tom Junod about the struggle to learn the true story of his complicated father and what it’s felt like to share it with the world. —Brin-Jonathan Butler

You begin this book at your father’s funeral service. You tell us that the driving reason you became a writer was to have the last word. Was that instinct and motivation always in relation to your own father? Wrestling control of a narrative?

I think that you’re right about that.

At the heart of your father’s identity is a lifetime’s worth of holding endless secrets. Most writers are detectives in other people’s lives. How was the process different applying all of your skills and craft to uncovering so many of your father’s darkest secrets?

I’ve been doing that with my family and family history ever since I was a child. I think there’s a good argument to be made that all my work prefigures this book. I was obsessed as a child with my dad’s secrets. I didn’t feel that I had the power to share his secrets, even when part of me thought that I should. I’ve written a bunch of magazine stories that search for the language in which to express secrets. The tone of the book is different from anything I’ve ever written. It’s a reckoning, but it’s also a conversation with my dad. At the end of the book I write him a letter. I show my cards. It’s different from anything I’ve ever done. I’m a highly motivated actor in this book. Franz Kafka’s letter to his father was one of the things that got me started on this book. I wanted to write an answer to Kafka as well as my dad.

When you begin talking about how powerful having the last word was for you in becoming a writer, I thought a bit about Nora Ephron. Her family talked about how when she wrote about them, she believed that nothing else was really worth saying. Why do you think having the last word was such an animating force for you in writing?

Because I was silenced. I took it upon myself to investigate my dad, not just as a veteran magazine writer writing a book, [but because] I’d been wanting to tell that story forever. I’ve already told it a bunch of different ways as a magazine writer. The dynamic of wanting to tell the truth about someone but feeling, at the same time, the impediments of that. I’ve done that as a writer from the very start and it comes from listening to my dad. He could tell me what to say but not what to think.

Uncovering Sports Illustrated’s forgotten pioneer

Virginia Kraft was among the most important sports journalists of her time. A pioneering adventure writer who was deadly with a rifle, she chiseled early cracks into publishing’s male-dominated world. She was also a competitive skier who raced sailboats and hot-air balloons, hunted with kings, and drank with Hemingway. So why hasn’t anyone heard of her?

In The Catch, globetrotting adventure and environmental journalist Emily Sohn tells a complicated story of a woman who did not fit into simple boxes. A multimedia profile published by Long Lead, the piece was named “Best Individual Editorial Feature” by the Webby Awards, won the 2024 Newhouse Mirror Award for Best Profile, and was included in Triumph Books’s The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024. Read The Catch today.

Is it fair to say your dad’s dream in life was to become something like Frank Sinatra? Some version of that as a crooner or to be recognized in the culture like Sinatra?

Sure. Of course. Without a doubt.

And he never realized that dream. How many people who dreamed it did? But it made me think about your relationship to ambition as a response to his. How much of your dad not attaining his dream informed or offered fuel for you to get where you did with your dream?

I really don’t know. I think it possibly requires a level of self understanding that surpasses my own. My ambition snuck up on me. I first wanted to be a writer that wanted to make a living out of being a writer. I wanted to be a writer who raised the bar to a certain level. Then I wanted to write a memoir that would stand up with any memoir. And all of those things seem so hard — hard even in retrospect. I didn’t have it in me to voice any sort of great ambition. How could I say I wanted to be one of the greatest writers or journalists ever when I was a handbag salesman. I had never taken a journalism course. I didn’t even get a job writing stories until I was almost 30 years old.

The ambition has always come to me, story by story. I’ve never had a master plan. But when I do things, I get pretty obsessed with them. It taps into something in myself. I would do anything for the story or this piece of writing to succeed. So maybe what I said sounds pretty ambitious. My dad wasn’t the next Sinatra. He tried to get on a talent show and choked. I think I saw a vulnerability in that. When I was a kid, my overpowering ambition was to be able to sit in a room with my dad and not cry. I became who I am in order to have a certain kind of bravery. That kind of bravery finds its way into the way I tell stories and the way I tell stories has led me to success. So, I think, both sorts of things feed off each other.

Truman Capote’s last book took its title from how answered prayers can inflict even more damage than unanswered prayers in some situations. Would there have been some kind of tragedy in your dad’s life if he had achieved becoming the next Sinatra? Or would it have become a kind of Peggy Lee “Is That All There Is?” tragedy to it?

He loved that song, by the way.

Donald Trump’s favorite also.

Wow. Well, if my dad had made it, I don’t think my family would have stayed together. In another way, I don’t know if our family life would have been that different than it already was. My dad lived like a celebrity. He bedded women like a celebrity. He turned peoples’ heads like a celebrity. I was quite aware of that all the time. So maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. I don’t know.

I’ve seen a number of photographs of you promoting the book wearing a turtleneck. I’m not sure if that’s done ironically with a wink or not. But I think your dad said it’s the most elegant article of clothing a man can wear. Can you indulge me for just a second and clarify why you think this is? I’ve nursed a profound hatred of turtlenecks all my life.

Because they frame your face.

What if I don’t enjoy my face being framed?

It puts your face up on a little pedestal.

Maybe my aversion to turtlenecks is just down to you and your dad having superior bone structure to me. If you were starting out in journalism today, with the ecosystem so depleted compared to when you started your career, how would you approach it?

Number one, I was lucky. I came up at the right time for a certain kind of writing to be nourished and rewarded. That was a really lucky stroke. The media landscape now is in the podcast world. The social media world. It’s not conversation or discussion or even investigation. I miss the joy of people and myself finding the right language for experience. It’s not just that media has gone away, it’s language, and that is really hard to deal with.

Writing requires more attention than listening to podcasts. You can talk for three hours and not say the things that you could write in a paragraph. But talk has steadily moved to the forefront while writing recedes. I’d like to think that the young person I was starting out would’ve found a way to keep writing. But I really don’t know and I don’t know what would have happened to me. And I don’t know what would have happened to me if I didn’t write.

I felt like if I encountered your dad in the wild I would have really gotten a kick out of him. But in his role as your father and all the weight of his secrets and the damage he caused your family — what’s it like now that he’s been gone for 20 years? Do you miss him? Is there relief on any level with him gone?

You know, I still dream about him. I like those dreams. I like when he creeps behind the walls of sleep and announces himself. I guess I miss him. I guess there’s relief also. The book really began when I decided to not judge him or even analyze him, but to recreate him on the page. Or try to recreate him on the page. And it feels so weird that I brought him back to some degree. Because so much of my writing has been about trying to find my way, both away from him, and yet toward him.

Further reading from Tom Junod:

• In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man (Doubleday, March 10. 2026)

• “The Falling Man” (Esquire, September 9, 2003)

• “Can You Say...Hero?” (Esquire, April 6, 2017)

• “Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?” (Esquire, January 18, 2011)

• “My Father’s Fashion Tips” (GQ, June 6, 2007)

For weeks in February 2018, the James Campbell High School girls water polo team practiced in the Pacific Ocean. The biggest public high school in Hawaii, it hadn’t booked the team a pool. Or hired them a head coach. They even overlooked scheduling tryouts. So a few blocks away from their school at Ewa Beach, the team’s 18 girls swam out past where the waves were breaking, kept clear of the coral, and tried to practice their sport without any goals or boundaries.

The first game of the season was less than two weeks out.

That’s where Kim Cross opens Title Waves, the latest feature published by Long Lead. It’s the story of high school athlete Ashley Badis and A.B. v. Hawaii State Department of Education, the landmark Title IX class action lawsuit the girls filed, and what came of it.

But the story extends far beyond the bounds of that beach. The piece braids in the history of Hawaii congresswoman Patsy Mink authoring Title IX in 1971, and how the law was nearly gutted years later by a single House vote. From there, Cross tracks a generation of women athletes who had to battle just to keep the law enforced. That work isn’t done. The settlement for the 2018 case in Hawaii finally came down in March 2024, and its impact has rippled across the country ever since.

Cross was featured in our Depth Perception newsletter last May, speaking with Jenna Schnuer at the time about In Light of All Darkness, her book on the kidnapping and murder of Polly Klaas. Title Waves is a different kind of story, but Cross’s empathy for her subjects connects them both. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. —Parker Molloy

How did this piece come to be? Hawaii isn’t a place you’ve worked before, and Title IX isn’t a beat you’d built. So how did this story end up on your desk?

I’ve got to give props to my editors. David Wolman lives in Hawaii, and he’s a legendary spotter of great stories. He saw it and smartly realized, “This is a great story, and we should have a woman report it.” So he took it to John Patrick Pullen at Long Lead, and they decided we needed to find the right female writer to do this.

I knew Long Lead because I’d been interviewed by Emily Sohn, who wrote The Catch. She interviewed me about what it’s like to be a woman of color in the very white-male-dominated sports writing world. … Until they reached out, it hadn’t occurred to me, but people keep coming to me with these stories — probably because I’m an athlete and a long-form narrative writer. I’ve written about the fight for a women’s Tour de France, the fight for a women’s big-wave surfing category at Mavericks. And recently I wrote a story called “The Alchemists” about teenage girls who fought for the right to ride bikes in Afghanistan, where they had to convince their culture to change its mind. So they probably looked at that and probably had a recommendation from my friend Glenn Stout, who’s edited for Long Lead. That’s how it got on my radar.

You’ve said that before writing this story, you were pretty ignorant about the history of Title IX. That’s a sharp thing for a journalist who’s an athlete and a coach to state publicly. What was the moment when that ignorance actually broke for you?

The moment I realized the extent of my ignorance about Title IX was when I was reading about how girls didn’t have locker rooms at all of these high schools in Hawaii. It made me think back to high school. I was a soccer player, among other sports, and I got to thinking, “Did we have a locker room? I don’t remember.”

I went on Facebook and messaged my old teammates. The keeper of the team, Leslie, messaged back and said, “No, we only got to use the visiting football team’s locker room if it was raining or really, really cold.” I didn’t realize what the boys had. We never saw the field house. One day, I got to peek inside, and I had no idea this whole world existed. They had their own T-shirts. I think we had a jersey, and we had to buy our own shorts and everything else. The school supplied us with a jersey, which we had to return every year, and balls — and I think that’s it. I was shocked.

The latest from Long Lead:

In February 2018, a girls water polo team was practicing in the ocean, dodging coral and foot-high waves because their school couldn’t — or wouldn’t — get them pool time. Seeing the boys’ sports teams getting support they didn’t have, they complained to the school. When those pleas went ignored, they did something that ultimately changed the lives of women across the U.S.: They sued.

In Title Waves, the latest feature from Long Lead, Kim Cross tells the stories of Patsy Mink, the trailblazing congresswoman who authored Title IX in 1971, and Ashley Badis, a water polo player with a rocket arm who simply wanted her school to play by the rules. Fifty years apart, these two courageous Hawaiian women leveled the playing field for women in education across the U.S. With photos by Jenny Sathngam and video by Vincent Ricafort, it’s a stirring braided narrative about the fight for gender equality in the Civil Rights Era and the continuing need for vigilance today.

Of the federal laws protecting women’s rights, Title IX is one of the strongest and most enduring. Told at a time when the political tide has turned against this landmark law, Title Waves is a reminder of the sacrifices and gains made by generations of tenacious women. As one of Badis’s classmates says, “This is not just for us…. It’s for the girls behind us.” Read Title Waves, today.

The settlement for this case was just in March 2024 but your piece extends into news from earlier this year. How long were you actually reporting and writing it? And what did the marinade phase look like?

This was warp speed, compounded with some major pressure and life issues. I started reporting in the fall of 2025. During the reporting, I lost my mother, who should have been a Title IX athlete. She was one of those women who grew up wanting to climb trees and play sports, and she was forced to play the violin. So when I came along, she put me in all the sports.

She died in a sudden and traumatic way in December. I had a reporting trip to Hawaii booked in early January, and I had about a week to think — do I postpone this? Then I decided, ”There’s no point. It’s not going to hurt less. And maybe getting to Hawaii and diving into my purpose will make me feel better.” I dedicated my reporting to her, since she would have loved the story. She knew about it before she died and was really excited.

I got to Hawaii in January and had done a lot of pre-reporting. Before I land on the ground anywhere to start the real in-depth immersion reporting, I do a ton of background research. I researched the history of Title IX. I knew it was written and championed by Patsy Mink, a congresswoman from Hawaii. I didn’t know until researching the story that Patsy Mink was the first woman of color ever elected to Congress. She was an American born to Japanese parents. I’m Japanese American, so that felt pretty exciting to me.

Then I started looking at the patterns that were developing over time — the fight for codification and enforcement and vigilance, and how without constant vigilance and a fight to enforce this law, we backslide. Over the years, women fight for these rights, and they get codified into law, but enforcement is totally a different story.

I’d grown up taking a lot of my rights as a female athlete for granted. I grew up water skiing on a catfish pond in Alabama with three boys who felt like big brothers. We roughhoused. They would slam-dunk me in the pond. It wasn’t abuse; it was just that they treated me like one of the boys. Because of them, I grew up moving through the world behaving like an average male athlete, and that was a gift. So learning all of this history made me feel a debt of gratitude for the women who paved the way and fought the fights to change the world I inherited.

[I had] interesting conversations with Ginny Gilder, who was one of the women on the first Title IX crew team at Yale. She recounted a time she went into the locker room to lift weights with her team captain, and the men’s crew captain came over and said, “What are you doing here, girls? This is our equipment, not for girls.” Ginny was a freshman, and her captain said, “ First of all, we’re women, but OK, boys. I guess you pay more tuition than we do, right?”

I talked a lot with Ginny because I wanted to know what I might be missing. How should I think about this? What parts of Title IX history ought to be reflected in the story of this generation’s fight? She helped me think about that a lot. She went on to be part of the Title IX strip protest, which I think is one of the most interesting stories I’d never heard of.

They were fed up. Like the girls in this story, they tried petitioning the administration — “can we get a locker room?” After a bunch of empty promises, they realized it wasn’t going anywhere, so they decided to pull a publicity stunt. They recruited a photographer from the Yale paper, who was also a stringer for The New York Times, and a writer. They brought them along when they marched into the office of the female athletics director and stripped down naked. They had “Title IX” written across their bare chests and backs. “These are the bodies you’re exploiting. We’re doing this because you’re not listening to us otherwise, and this is what we have to do to be heard.” A great headline ran in The Times: “Yale Women Strip to Protest a Lack of Crew’s Showers.” A week later: “Yale Women’s Crew to Get Locker Room.”

Another thing that didn’t make it into the story that I loved: Wookie Kim, who was one of the lawyers for the ACLU who fought for Ashley and the other plaintiffs, had actually been a coxswain at Yale. He was like, “Oh, I didn’t know that story — I’ve actually been in the Gilder Boathouse,” which Ginny Gilder and her family built years later. It’s funny how all of these things connect, and often we don’t know about them.

You said that after your mom died, you decided to go through with the trip because it wasn’t going to hurt less, and maybe it would help. Did it help?

I have a great story about this. After my mom died, a week before Christmas, I’d been learning to river surf in Idaho, where we have a man-made wave. I went to the river to feel better on the day of her cremation. Then I picked up her ashes. When I went to Hawaii, I took a little Aspirin bottle of her ashes. I thought, “I’m going to spread them in the sea somewhere.”

Ashley and her family are surfers. My editor said, “You know, they’re surfers — you should surf with them. It would be a good way to get to know them and see them in their element.” I said, “I could do that. I’ll take one for the team.” On the last night I was there, I surfed with them a couple of times. And on that last night, I said, “Do you mind if I spread some of my mom’s ashes? Would that be weird?” They said, “Oh no, it’s called a paddle out. We do this all the time.”

So we paddled out beyond the break. It was just Ashley and her boyfriend and me. I said a couple of words — I said goodbye to my mom and said I missed her — and I sprinkled her ashes in the surf. Right then, I had time to shed exactly one tear, and a little rogue wave came up and bopped me and made me giggle. It felt like my mom, because she was a practical joker. Ashley said, “Here we call it mana. Your mom is with you now — her spirit is with you, and you’re going to have a great day surfing. She’s going to surf with you.”

And I kid you not, I went out and I had the best surf of my life. I caught almost every wave, which never happens. Even the Hawaiians were like, “That’s kind of weird.” It was really special. As we were suiting up to paddle out, I realized that when my mom lost her mother years ago, she used the little bit of money she inherited to take us on a family trip. It was my dad, my husband, and me at the time, and she took us to Hawaii. So it felt like this surprisingly wonderful, perfect moment. It made me feel a lot better.

In the story itself, the Hawaii Department of Education refused to comment. The principal and the athletic director didn’t answer questions. The superintendent ignored calls from the parents. In a piece where institutional bureaucracy is the antagonist — I think that’s a fair way to put it — what changes about how you approach it as a journalist when many of the major players give you nothing? This has to be a different kind of structural problem than you had in In Light of All Darkness, where the FBI cooperated with you.

I try to start at a place of empathy. I try to put myself in the point of view of all of the players. I’ve been an athlete, I’ve also been a coach, and I’m married to essentially an athletic director — a league director of a major sport. I listen to him deal with the complications of parents and athletes and rules and regulations. So I feel like I can naturally empathize with all of those roles.

To a certain extent, the bad actor in this whole thing is the system. There are systemic inequities and systemic problems that keep going. For the most part, you can have good actors in a system that’s set up not to succeed. I wanted to approach them and say, “Look, I realize this is complicated, and often things are really highly nuanced. I want to start by just offering to listen to your point of view. We don’t even have to go on the record. I can just listen. You can decide if you want to talk to me and go on the record.” In most cases, people are willing to at least meet me and hear me out, and help me understand.

I had one person representing the other side who said, “I don’t want to be quoted. You can interview me, you can record it for fact-checking, but I don’t want to be quoted, and I don’t want to be celebrated.” This person, actually, I thought was an example of someone who was on the other side of the lawsuit but did a lot of work in a good way, and might ought to be celebrated. They said, “This might actually make my job more difficult. In this culture, it would be like, ‘Why is this person standing up and saying, look what a great job I did?’ It could make my job more difficult.” I said, “I can respect that.”

For people who didn’t respond, I just try to give them an opportunity for agency. I had a lot of documents that gave them a voice without them being required to talk to me. There were some passages I didn’t use that could have made them look like jerks — but without getting to know them, I didn’t want to do that. There’s a way to represent, based on reporting through documents, what was said in recorded verbatim dialogue, and the actions that were done. Through that, readers can draw their own conclusions about what kind of person they are.

This case ended with a massive settlement, but you don’t end on that note. That felt like a deliberate move away from a triumphant ending, which would have been the obvious choice for a lot of writers. Can you walk me through that decision?

Absolutely. I’m a structure geek. I think a lot about structure. I study it in movies and songs. And I think a lot about endings, because I don’t like to sit down and start writing a story until I know the ending. This had many possible endings. There were two more that ended up in the first draft and got cut.

One of the themes of this whole story is that the girls who have the courage to stand up and fight, often, if they do win relief, it doesn’t happen until they’ve graduated. So they really are doing the ultimate act of a teammate — they’re taking one for the team. And it comes at great cost. It is emotionally exhausting to go through these lawsuits.

I thought that the quieter moments also acknowledge that there’s no final victory — you have to keep fighting.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to ask: Title IX was a lifelong passion for Patsy Mink. For Ashley, it may yet become a defining moment in her life. What did reporting this huge feature mean to you, and what do you hope the impact will be?

First, I’m so grateful that they found me and thought to bring this to me, because I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do this story. I don’t have a good reason why.

But it’s made me realize that because of my background — because I know so many different sports and have competed as an athlete in a lot of male-dominated sports, and I was the head coach of my son’s co-ed mountain bike high school team, and I had a transgender athlete on that team, and I’m married to this league director and can see the challenges he faces on a daily basis, year-round — I feel like I have the ability to understand and think about things like this that someone who hasn’t had those experiences might not, in the same way. As a woman who does believe we should be treated fairly, I feel now like I have some knowledge to share with other girls and women, to empower them to understand their rights and how to fight for them.

I would love to see it turn into a speaking platform. I’d love to pull together a panel of some of the incredible first-generation, second-generation Title IX athletes. I’d love to introduce them to Ashley. One thing I learned is that there’s this underground network of women who have gone through this, and they talk to each other, and they help each other. A lot of them have gone on, not only to continue advocating for women’s rights inside and outside of athletics, but they go out of their way to help other women. They went out of their way to help me. A lot of these women are CEOs who probably didn’t have time to talk with the likes of me for something in which they might not be quoted — but they did. They bent over backwards to help me.

So I’d like to be part of that network — a connector. I’d love to bring Ashley in and connect her with some of these women. Who knows what could happen?

Further reading and listening from Kim Cross:

• “Out of the Wild” (Food & Wine, July 2025)

• In Light of all Darkness (Grand Central Publishing, October 1, 2024)

• “The Alchemists” (Bicycling, October 23, 2024)

• “The Redemption” (Bicycling, July 6, 2018)

• What Stands in a Storm (Atria Books, March 1, 2016)

Ever since Trump entered the Oval Office the first time around, there’s been a consistent need for journalists who understand the far-right and are able to decode how they’re organized, their behavior online, and many different aspects of that world. Christopher Mathias is one of those journalists. His latest book, To Catch a Fascist, explores the efforts of anti-fascist organizers to infiltrate and unmask members of white nationalist groups in America.

The book focuses on the often misunderstood group of people we call antifa and the years of work the movement has put into unmasking fascists. Mathias has covered the far-right for years, using his reporting to similarly unveil white supremacists in our society who were cops, soldiers, teachers, and politicians. His work has shown that many people who appear to be regular citizens are living double lives and fighting for a racist cause.

Previously a senior reporter at HuffPost, Mathias now works as an independent journalist writing for outlets like MS NOW, Zeteo, and The Guardian. In the latest edition of Depth Perception, Mathias shares his findings from his research for this book, why antifa members’ efforts are important, and how all of this connects with the history of white nationalism in America. —Thor Benson

There’s been a long debate about antifa. Some people will say it’s this real, centralized organization that is controlling the left, and then others will say it basically doesn’t exist or that it’s just an idea. So how did you approach that going into this?

Like most Americans, I didn’t know what the fuck antifa was really before 2017. My association with them was largely from viral videos of black-clad leftists punching Nazis in the streets across America. I think that’s how antifa was kind of introduced to the public, and that initiated this flurry of “What is antifa?” explainers across the media.

But I was in Charlottesville, at the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and this was the largest white supremacist gathering in a generation. Afterwards, it was my task [as a journalist on assignment] to investigate this insurgent fascist movement, the “alt-right,” and to unmask its members. I quickly realized that there was already a network of people doing that work really effectively, and that network was antifa.

I realized that although, yes, antifa sometimes punches Nazis, the bulk of the work they do is actually research and intelligence gathering. I also realized why I think antifa is so inscrutable to the wider public, which is that it’s a very underground network. Its practitioners are anonymous to prevent reprisals from the far-right and from the state … Antifa is a style of politics. It’s a tradition — a militant tradition — of confronting the far-right by any means necessary. Anyone can kind of adopt it and do it. Because it’s like an anarchist enterprise, for the most part, it’s not structured the way most Americans conceive of things.

There’s no leader. There’s no headquarters. There’s not really membership fees or whatever. There’s no billionaire benefactors or hierarchies. It’s a tough thing, I think, for people to wrap their heads around sometimes.

Many on the left also get it wrong.

The flip side of the MAGA caricature of antifa is that a lot of liberals and centrists and Democrats insist antifa doesn’t exist. Because it’s just a shortening of the word “antifascist,” [liberals] think it applies to mostly everyone. I’m really trying to push back against that. I think antifa refers to a very specific thing and it’s a very specific tradition with specific tenets.

There’s kind of a liberal meme. It’ll be troops storming the beach at Normandy, and then it’ll say, “antifa, 1944” or whatever. That’s a misapprehension. Yes, the U.S. Army was fighting the Nazis, but the U.S. Army was also a colonial army. It was also a segregated army. Black soldiers fought in World War II and then returned home to live under Jim Crow. You could argue Jim Crow was a kind of a fascist social arrangement. I think the more instructive way to think about antifa is the Americans who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War — who were typically anarchists and socialists and communists.

Yeah, I once met some antifa folks at a protest before Trump first took office years ago. Like you said, they were wearing black, and they were passing out information. I didn’t think much of it. I’ve always thought saying you’re “antifa” was kind of like saying you’re punk or an anarchist. It’s just a label that anyone can take on. You can end up in certain communities and connect to other people with similar interests, but it’s not like there’s a punk headquarters.

Exactly. It’s like that famous Supreme Court ruling about porn: You know it when you see it. I feel that way about antifa.

The other thing I’m glad you brought up is the punk element. I think that is most people’s association with antifa and the aesthetics of antifa. That’s for good reason, because the modern iteration of antifa really did emerge from these previous networks of anti-racist action and skinheads against racial prejudice in the 1980s and 1990s that were formed to kick Nazis out of the punk scene. They grew more politically sophisticated and started to target white supremacist groups writ large. They developed a very specific set of militant confrontational tactics that really worked.

That’s what this modern iteration of antifa is based on. As my book argues, [it] is not so much a punk phenomenon anymore, although there are still many punks in it. The practitioners really represent a wide swath of everyday Americans — working class, middle class, rednecks, soccer moms, punks, warehouse workers, people barely scraping by, people living comfortably in the suburbs. It’s kind of all over the place.

“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 website, 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.

It seems like you found that these people were doing some important work. Why isn’t the public more aware of what they’re doing?

My book is about anti-fascist espionage, research, and doxing. When I say the word doxing, I think most people associate it with posting someone’s private information, their phone number or address online, as a means of inviting harassment. That’s a tactic you see deployed by the far-right all the time. When I say doxing in the anti-fascist sense, I mean it to say the digital equivalent of ripping the white hood off of a Klansman.

It’s the act of identifying a previously unidentified white supremacist or Nazi who clocks into their day job as a professor, teacher, pastor, politician, [or] police officer. I think we kind of forget sometimes the degree to which Trump’s rise to power corresponded with this explosion in secretive white supremacist groups. The phrase I use in the book is an attempt to “resurrect the Klan’s invisible empire for the digital age.”

Antifa kind of took it upon themselves to figure out who was in this new invisible empire. They did this through a remarkable feat of what I would argue is data journalism and open source intelligence. They would infiltrate Nazi groups, sometimes in person. My book follows an anti-fascist spy that goes undercover into a group called Patriot Front, and they would come away from that infiltration having stolen hundreds of thousands of internal Nazi chats.

Those chats would then be posted in a public database that anti-fascist researchers across the country could mine for clues to identify their local Nazis. Over the last 10 years, as my book documents, they ended up unmasking thousands of American white supremacists and often revealing them to be people in positions of real power where they could do real harm. The intent of it was not only to alert your community about the guy down the street who might be liable to commit a hate crime, but it’s also to create a social cost for being in organized fascism.

If you want to join that fascist group, go right ahead, but we’re going to figure out you’re in that group, and we’re going to let your community know. We’re going to name and shame you. You might lose your job, you might lose your girlfriend, your family might be really mad at you.

There are stories I tell in the book, like when an anti-fascist spy went undercover into Identity Evropa, which was one of the main Nazi groups in Charlottesville. It’s a very kind of suit-and-tie fascist group. It’s mostly college-educated people. They have really good jobs and respectable jobs, and their whole goal is to infiltrate the Republican Party. Spies steal all of these messages, and they go into this public database over the course of the next year. Anti-fascist researchers unmask about 100 members of the group. There are many stories like that from antifa research and espionage, combined with other tactics like confronting fascists in the streets, which have led to the dissolution or disbandment of groups.

I don’t know when you stopped writing this book, but you might have noticed we have some masked people around these days. What do you think about how our law enforcement is masked now? And do you see efforts to unmask them?

One of the more interesting parts of the book for me was researching the history of masked fascism or white supremacy in America, which obviously led me to read a lot about the Klan. The first Klan wore masks to commit violence in an effort to destroy Reconstruction, to roll back all the gains won by freed black people.

There was a real effort to unmask and prosecute the Klan and to document their heinous crimes. They were destabilized and eventually dissolved. But also part of the reason that the first Klan dissolved is that they weren’t needed anymore. Reconstruction was abandoned, and that kind of ushered in this era, not only of Jim Crow, but of lynching.

The first Klan traded in the anonymity of the white hood for the anonymity of the lynch mob of the second Klan. A similar dynamic happens. There are millions of people in the second Klan, and they do meet fierce resistance and eventually dissolve for a bunch of reasons, but they take credit for the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which restricts immigration to a very select group of northern European countries.

The Johnson-Reed Act is named after a Klansman, [Albert] Johnson, who was a congressman [while] in the Klan. Incidentally, that’s the law Stephen Miller wants to return us to — that kind of immigration quota. I’m saying all this because the whole point of masked fascism is to create a world in which you won’t need to wear masks at all. It is an alarming prospect to consider that the people wearing masks now are armed agents of the state, and it’s alarming to consider a world in which they would feel comfortable not wearing masks.

I think what we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and elsewhere is an effort to create a social cost for being in ICE, to kind of say that, “If you don’t get out now, we’re going to let everyone know you were a part of this, and you will live with that shame for the rest of your life. You’ll never be able to wash it off.”

Antifa spent a decade unmasking this new generation of fascists, and now some of them are turning their attention to unmasking ICE agents. They’re putting up flyers with the identities of ICE agents. They’re analyzing videos of ICE agents committing brutality and figuring out who those ICE agents are.

Further reading from Christopher Mathias:

• “Antifa used to unmask neo-Nazis, now it’s exposing ICE: ‘Predators don’t get anonymity’” (The Guardian, January 30, 2026)

• “What an Antifa Activist Learned While Undercover With Patriot Front” (Talking Points Memo, February 3, 2026)

• “Liberals Think Antifa Isn’t Real. But It Is—and It Knows How to Win.” (The Nation, January 12, 2026)

• “Trump’s new anti-antifa panic is the start of something much more dangerous” (MS NOW, September 23, 2025)

Thomas Goetz rarely makes things easy for himself. Nobody would have quibbled had Goetz continued on with his career as a (mostly) general interest magazine editor and writer known for driving innovation and, at Wired, winning a slew of National Magazine Awards for the results.

But Goetz felt somewhat untethered. “It was evident to me that the journalists who had sustained careers had some level of expertise [in a specific topic]. I was craving that. I had a Master’s in American literature from UVA, which was not expertise in any way,” says Goetz. “It was a winding road.”

So, while still the executive editor of Wired, Goetz went back to school for a Master’s in Public Health from the University of California, Berkeley. The degree set him on a completely nontraditional career path driven by his love of “learning as I’m making things.”

In recent years, anchored by his focus on health, Goetz has worked as both a journalist and an entrepreneur, co-founding Iodine, a consumer-facing information service about medication, and Building H, a nonprofit research group that looks into the impact of products and services on people’s health. He was also the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s first entrepreneur-in-residence. His most recent venture is “Drug Story,” a narrative podcast that covers the world of health one drug at a time.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Goetz talks about his shift to audio, why he chose drugs as his entry point to health stories, and some of the high points from his life in print (and early web) journalism. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Jenna Schnuer

When you decided it was time to focus your career on a specific beat, why did you choose health? And how did it lead toward a more entrepreneurial life for you?

I come from a medical family. I have a great passion for public health and for understanding the larger social and commercial structures that manifest into our health.

After [I earned my Master’s in Public Health], I was still at Wired but I started to write much more about biotechnologies, public health epidemics, epidemic modeling — stuff that years later turned out to be dead on with COVID epidemiology. Then I wrote a book, The Decision Tree, about the future of data-driven medicine. It became a very persuasive idea to me. Being that I’m in San Francisco, I started thinking about launching a company [in that space].

I left Wired and started a company called Iodine. I had a key partner in my friend Matt Mohebbi, who was a data scientist at Google. We wanted to model and suck up data based on real world experiences. We started with drugs, because there was a lot of search activity on drugs. We created this consumer website that tried to explain the difference between efficacy and effectiveness, which is really the difference between what happens with a medicine in the laboratory versus in the real world. That led me on this 10-year journey of entrepreneurship and innovation, where we created some really neat tools — a lot of data-driven tools — but eventually ended up selling that company to GoodRx. Then I created this data science team inside GoodRx. I was there for seven years, but ultimately I left because I was kind of done with that chapter.

Why did you decide to go back to journalism after Iodine?

I’ve always taken pride in the job of a journalist. I really think the word “journalist” captures most of what I try to do, which is to learn about something and then tell the story about that thing in a way that hopefully helps the audience understand it. [While launching Iodine,] I kept my foot in journalism. I was a columnist at Inc. Magazine, [where I wrote] about the startup life and startup world in Silicon Valley.

Once I left GoodRx, it was really cool for me to think about, “Oh, I can actually go back. I can do something journalistically, but do it in my own way.”

Confronting the cause — and effect — of COVID misinformation

In August 2020, nearly 40,000 demonstrators gathered in Berlin at a rally organized by Querdenken, a fast-growing group leading Germany’s COVID-skeptic movement. Not far from the event, a group of protesters tried to break into Germany’s parliament. Taking place four months before the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, this incident was eerily prescient — if only Americans had been watching.

The story of that day and its consequences — told through Darren Loucaides’ immersive reporting, hauntingly illustrated by Jun Cen, and presented in a captivating 3-D design — is a true tale of misinformation, its causes and its effects. Read it today at querdenken.longlead.com.

What’s the origin story of “Drug Story”? The sound design and storytelling remind me of Avery Truffleman’s “Articles of Interest,” which is one of my favorite shows.

I basically cooked up this idea to use a drug to tell these larger stories [about health]. Why are there high rates of depression in the United States? Why do we have high rates of anxiety? Why do we have high rates of obesity? These are all what are often called “diseases of civilization.” It seems obvious but, for me, it was an epiphany that we’re not biologically predetermined to die of heart disease. That is the result of the world we built.

My goal was to use the drugs to talk about how we’re treating these much larger problems. I came up with this structure that lets me go a lot of places, but has enough boundaries and framing so that I could take a leap from place to place. “Articles of Interest” and “99% Invisible” are key influences.

When I started Iodine we were building these new kinds of websites. And at Wired, we were intensely creative. We were largely print, but we were creative about how we used two-dimensional space and we won a lot of awards for that. So I was very curious about how I could develop something in the audio space that would be narratively compelling and not just conversational.

I did talk to a lot of people who were way more [experienced] than me in podcasting. A lot of the guidance I got was, “Well, what works is conversational interview podcasts. Probably with video and once-a-week in perpetuity.” I thought about that and I was like, “Well, I’m not going to do that.”

What have you learned about the differences in reporting for audio versus print?

In science and medical journalism, you have to prove your points. I had to learn how to be very selective with the use of data and numbers because it’s very hard to parse numbers aurally.

I’m very fortunate to have an old Wired colleague, Rachel Swaby, who is my producer. She taught me the art of audio. I learned things like using short sentences and [not using] too many numbers. And then, thankfully, [Swaby is] a genius at sound production.

We did things like find audio of old commercials, which, I think, is part of the story of drugs in the United States. We found a lot of ways to use audio in fun ways. That’s what we were trying to do, ultimately, was create a fun hour of audio.

How are you paying for this independence?

I signed up GoodRx as my sole sponsor for that first season, which helped me cover much of my production costs. They got a very good deal, because the show got like 10 times the audience I was hoping for.

Any other revenue streams? No stickers or other traditional podcast merch?

No stickers. Maybe season two I should do merch.

For the second season, I’m trying to do flat-fee sponsors again. These are companies that get the podcast, want to be part of it, and understand [that the listeners include] a pretty sophisticated audience of doctors and pharmacists and people who really care about medicine and care about their health. That’s a good audience. We get an average of somewhere between 50,000 and 75,000 downloads per episode. It’s very healthy.

How long did it take to finish the first season?

It took me a year to do those 10 episodes, which was longer than I had anticipated. There was a certain element of procrastination involved, because no one knew that I was doing this.

So now that it’s out and people know it exists, I have to be much more efficient with my time, but it is a long process. The last episode [of season one] went out March 31 and I’m aiming to have it start up again in six months, before Thanksgiving.

Read more from Depth Perception:

The show is often quite a bit of fun but, obviously, there are some really serious parts and episodes that deal with big life challenges. How did you decide on the tone?

Whenever you have the chance — especially when you’re doing something [in the] sciences, [or in] health or medicine, which can be very grave, serious topics — to inject some levity, [you should]. Sound effects are a big part of that. It really does help [lighten] some of these very weighty subjects.

You don’t want to make light of some of these very serious diseases. Starting every episode with a patient’s story really sets the tone for the stakes involved. Even in cases where it’s like testosterone replacement, where the patient is just a guy who had some confidence problems [and] he was struggling with something. I think it’s important to give people a sense of the personal stakes involved but then, like with that episode on testosterone, there’s also this wacky world of Jose Canseco ads [where he’s] pitching herbal supplements.

What are your plans for the future? How long do you think you can keep “Drug Story” going?

In any pharmacy there are about 3,000 drugs behind the pharmacist’s counter. That’s a lot of drugs. Now, not all of those have a scintillating narrative history, but I have a list of another 50 or 60 drugs that have very compelling stories [associated with them]. There’s another five years of good drugs [for shows].

It’s hard to do health reporting these days without venturing into politics. How do you handle that?

I thought I could avoid it. And then the last two episodes, I decided to do episodes about ivermectin and fluoride, which is about how we take certain drugs and measures for granted. But even fluoride is now highly suspected by [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] and others. Anyway, I don’t think you can avoid politics, especially in these days when public health funding and scientific research is [going against] the basic principles of evidence and science. But, ultimately, I believe in science and rationality as a means of validation.

Further reading and listening from Thomas Goetz:

• “Drug Story” (“Drug Story” on Substack, launched Jan. 6, 2026)

• “Do Americans expect too much from drugs?” (STAT, Jan. 8, 2026)

• “Thomas Goetz on the Heart of Healthcare” (“Heart of Healthcare” podcast, Feb. 11, 2025)

• The Decision Tree (Rodale Books, March 1, 2011)

• “It’s time to redesign medical data” (TEDMED 2010 from TEDTalks, Oct. 2010)

David Roberts has been a journalist for over 20 years and he’s largely spent that time reporting on solutions to the monumental problem of climate change. He joined the environmental news organization Grist in 2004 and spent the first decade of his career there before moving to Vox in 2015.

Roberts eventually decided to strike out on his own in 2020 with his newsletter, Volts. It quickly became one of the most influential climate-focused newsletters in the United States, with nearly 100,000 subscribers, and he’s been plugging away at it ever since. He also hosts a podcast by the same name that serves as an extension of his chosen area of coverage.

“The only way to [succeed] is to find your fellow freaks and get their loyalty. You have to build on that or else you’re screwed,” Roberts says.

Getting readers to take an interest in climate-related issues can be difficult. Researchers have found that climate news has actually been decreasing in recent years because of this. A lot of this work doesn’t drive major traffic.

“I don’t know why everybody else makes it boring, but it’s interesting to me. Maybe that comes across,” Roberts says.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we ask Roberts how his newsletter first took off, what resonates most with readers about climate coverage today, and where independent journalism is heading. —Thor Benson

Climate journalism often has a hard time getting attention. What do you think has made your newsletter work? Do you think it’s that people already knew who you were, and they were just ready to sign up for whatever you were doing? Or do you think it’s the way you’re covering climate?

Well, I would say both. I mean, the proximate reason it got off the ground is that I came to it with the audience already. I had already been at it for 15 years. But I think the reason I had that audience with me was that I covered these things somewhat differently than they’re normally covered.

I don’t know what it is about climate — I mean, I could speculate — but you are absolutely correct that most of the journalism it produces is boring, which is crazy to me. I think the reason [Volts] is popular is that, despite everyone always calling me a climate journalist, I rarely actually do any journalism about climate change. I haven’t written an article about climate change in years. I just take it for granted. I’m talking about the solutions [and] what we’re doing about it.

People are doing all kinds of crazy, interesting tech innovations and business things. There’s good state policy being passed. The world of decarbonization is vast and filled with activity. It’s the most fascinating thing going on right now, [and] it’s arguably the most important thing going on right now, with apologies to AI.

It’s incredibly hopeful. It’s like a hopeful story of technological advancement and good-willed people pushing back against bloated incumbents who are trying to stifle it. It’s just a fascinating story. So I don’t know why everybody else makes it boring, but it’s interesting to me. Maybe that comes across.

With the Iran war, for instance, you can’t understand the Iran War without understanding energy dynamics and the fact that we now have a bunch of technologies that are alternatives to fossil fuels. [That’s] poised to give us an alternative to the endless fossil fuel wars. This stuff is not a niche, liberal thing now. It’s world events. It is news. Heatmap has come along. It’s really good. Canary has come along. It’s really good.

Do you have a sense of what your readership is like? Are these people who have always been really interested in climate solutions and they’re coming to you for it? Or is it a more general audience?

I mean, any Substacker is mostly guessing about their audience. I don’t get a ton of information about them, so it’s mostly just through meeting them and interacting with them that I draw conclusions. But it is, as far as I can tell, roughly the audience I was aiming for, which is that the core of it is professionals who are involved in this stuff.

State policymakers and energy committee aides, I know they read it. I know they listen to the podcast. I did a [podcast episode] on this new campaign for better grid utilization. We’re using about 50% of the capacity of the grid today. A lot of people say that before we build a bunch of new shit, we should better utilize the grid we’ve already built. The guy I did the interview with, I heard from him that a couple of days later — the head of the Montana Energy Committee in the Montana Senate had contacted him.

They were like, “Hey, I heard the podcast. We want to put together a bill on this. Come present to us.” So the professionals who have their hands on [policy] listen. It’s also just people who are interested and who might be pondering a career change. I try to make it accessible for a generalist audience. Although, I will say as a media note, I spent the early part of my career battling with editors who told me, “You can’t get that in-depth. That will bore people.” What I have found consistently over and over again is that audiences are not children. They’re adults, and they’re not scared off by encountering material they might not immediately understand.

I’ve had numerous people say, “I listened to the podcast. I understood about 80% of it, but I liked that. I liked the feeling that there are people out there going deep on this.” There’s this weird idea that editors have that readers are just clicking on things that make them feel dopamine. It’s just infantilizing. I’ve cultivated an audience of people who like and want to be challenged and want to go deeper.

Maybe you can’t get to a million readers that way, but you can easily get an audience that can sustain one dude. There’s barely a monoculture anymore. There is barely a main signal anymore. It’s all niches. The only way to [succeed] is to find your fellow freaks and get their loyalty. You have to build on that or else you’re screwed.

The big picture: Documenting Mexico City’s water crisis

In the near future, Mexico City may run out of drinking water. As the parched megalopolis struggles to quench its thirst, scenes from one of the world’s largest and most populated cities show how water scarcity could one day impact people around the globe.

In the Long Lead feature The Last Drops of Mexico City, produced in collaboration with Magnum Photos, photographer Jérôme Sessini documents the megalopolis’s diminished drinking water supply, fixing his lens on the people impacted most by this arid new reality.

A 2026 merit winner for “Best Original Digital Photography” from the Society of Publication Designers, The Last Drops of Mexico City, was cited by the Anthem Awards for Best Sustainability, Environment and Climate Awareness News and Journalism. Read it today at mexicocitywater.longlead.com.

I’ve noticed more people talking about electric vehicles (EVs) since gas prices have gone way up. Have you noticed increased interest in renewables and EVs lately?

Oh, for sure. This is one area where I think we are not getting a clear view of things. We are an oil importer, despite what you often hear. We do import oil. We do pay the global price for oil. So when oil goes up, it screws us just like it screws everybody else. But we’re also the world’s number one oil producer. There are a lot of very powerful people in the U.S., some of whom have a lot of influence over the media, who do not want the public to see this and draw the obvious conclusion, which is that being hooked on fossil fuels sucks.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get away from being yanked around like this? And that is the conclusion that other countries are drawing. It’s obvious. EV sales are up. I think they climbed by 50% just in March in the EU. People are doubling down on solar. They’re doubling down on battery storage.

They are seeing, illustrated in extremely visceral terms, that you do not want your fate tied to a bunch of petro-authoritarians. You don’t want your fate tied to a particular narrow strait that petro-oligarchs are fighting over. The fact is that we are experiencing the greatest oil supply shock in history and the effects of that have only just begun.

When you listen to oil analysts, they’re like, “If the Strait [of Hormuz] isn’t opened ... that simply can’t happen. The world economy would [fall] apart. It simply can’t happen.” But, it’s happening. It’s still closed. Everybody in the U.S. is just walking around like there’s not a meteor fucking heading our way. I guess that’s just how we are now. It’s just kind of the American vibe now, but it’s insane.

Long story short, people are now much more interested in heat pumps to replace their furnaces. Renewables are getting a surge of new energy and new investment. It’s not really making U.S. headlines, but the rest of the world is receiving the obvious message from all of this.

The other big news story that you already mentioned is AI. It seems like there’s a lot of anger with the environmental impacts of AI. Do you think that’s going to play out in interesting or impactful ways?

It’s in a very interesting spot right now. Initially, you had these data center guys making these ludicrous growth projections. They assumed that they could just bully and disrupt and force their way through the energy industry the same way they bullied everybody else: “We need a bunch of new power to run all these data centers, and we’re just going to roll over utilities and demand a bunch of big nuclear plants. We’re going to build a bunch of big nuclear plants, because we’re big, manly guys.”

These guys are all on fucking ketamine. They’re all in weird private chats together. They’re all pumping each other up. It’s just a bunch of weirdos and they’re all into this masculine energy. They want a bunch of nuclear plants and they’ve banged their heads against the energy industry. You can’t get U.S. utilities to move fast. They don’t move fast and break things. They are the opposite. Their overriding social mandate is, “Don’t fucking break anything.” I’ve watched these fucking Silicon Valley dipshit cowboys kind of bang their heads against this.

They can’t get enough power online fast enough because the utilities won’t hook it up. They’re like, “Fine, we’ll just build it behind the meter.” That’s what they’re all trying to do now is just build natural gas plants right next to the data center. They won’t even hook up to the grid. It displays such ignorance of how energy works. But as my interview with Jigar Shah the other day went over, in some detail, it’s utterly impractical to do this. They won’t be able to do it, so already they’re running up against limits. These data centers consume the electricity of a small city. You’re trying to build a small city grid. It turns out that’s hard. You can’t just cowboy into it.

You can get solar and batteries on the grid quickly. The AI people are being forced, by the logic of the situation, to embrace distributed solar and batteries. There’s no other solution. They don’t like it. Solar and batteries are the obvious answer to all of our data center woes and all of our AI woes. That’s just physics and economics.

You got a head start on a lot of people when it comes to the newsletter thing. How are you feeling about how things are today with the growth of newsletters? And how do you feel about people pivoting to video?

I definitely feel the pressure to pivot to video and anybody who looks at the numbers will tell you to pivot to video. I do not get that. The appeal of watching two floating heads on the screen talking to one another utterly escapes me. But you can’t fight the numbers.

YouTube is a bigger podcast platform than Spotify [or] Apple. I don’t know. I see media people fumbling around trying to look for new business models, and they’re all kind of groping around the subscription model one way or another. We have got to find a new way to pay for everything. Ads aren’t going to pay for it. People will have to pay for it directly.

When you got the paper, you got sports and you got the politics and you got news. It was difficult to distinguish what exactly the public wants and is reading. When all that broke apart, sports became its own thing. Politics became its own thing. Hard news became its own thing. We got a much better sense of what the public wants. It doesn’t really seem like the public wants hard, reliable investigative reporting. It really doesn’t seem like that kind of good journalism is a viable market product on a mass scale. It basically requires some kind of subsidy.

I don’t know what that is, whether it’s public or you just find a friendly billionaire. That seems to be what most people are trying to do. I don’t know how that lasts, but it’s clear that the logic of consumer capitalism has subsumed everything else. The message to a young American these days is you are a consumer, which means you are always right. That means you are owed little dopamine hits. You are owed just the entertainment you want. Everything is going to be algorithmically designed for you to make you feel good and to flatter your prejudices.

Further reading from David Roberts:

• “Tom Steyer wants to be California’s climate governor” (Volts, April 27, 2026)

• “The big stories from the last year in electricity” (Volts, April 22, 2026)

• “Life as a clean energy journalist in an age of madness ” (Volts, April 20, 2026)

• “Doing data centers the not-dumb way” (Volts, April 15, 2026)

I asked Elliot Williams what surprised him most about interviewing Bernhard Goetz, the man who shot four Black teenagers on a New York City subway in 1984 and became, depending on who you asked, either a folk hero or a symbol of racist violence. Williams told me he expected at least some self-reflection. Even if Goetz still believed the shootings were justified, Williams figured there’d be a “comma, however” in there somewhere — an acknowledgment that one of the victims, Darrell Cabey, ended up brain-damaged and paralyzed. Something. Instead, Goetz told Williams he believed the men needed to be shot. That it was, essentially, a public service.

Williams is a CNN legal analyst, a former federal prosecutor who spent nearly eight years as a senior official in the Obama administration, and a Brooklyn-born son of Jamaican immigrants. He’s also a first-time author whose book, Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ‘80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation, was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. It traces the Goetz case from the tabloid-fueled panic of 1980s New York through the criminal trial and into its long afterlife, drawing a line to Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny along the way. But the book is as much about the media ecosystem that turned Goetz into “the Subway Vigilante” as it is about the shooting itself. Williams dedicates an entire chapter to Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the New York Post and the arms race of sensational crime coverage that followed. It’s a story about fear, but also about the people who figured out how to sell it.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Williams about the case, the book, what it was like to get Goetz on the phone, and why America keeps making heroes out of men with guns. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. —Parker Molloy

You’ve got an interesting career path. A law degree, a Master’s of Journalism from Columbia, a federal prosecutor, a senior official in the Department of Justice during the Obama administration, and now a legal analyst on CNN. How do you think about the relationship between these many careers, law, and journalism? Do they pull in the same sort of direction?

I would say oddly enough, law and journalism are all about distilling information and presenting it in a clear way. Now, of course, any lawyer or journalist has to tailor their approach to their audience. Communication isn’t one-size-fits-all. But I actually do think there’s a tremendous amount of overlap between the two. I don’t think it’s a surprise that there are a lot of journalists with law degrees or former journalists that go on to law school. And so the more I’ve combined it all through the years, the more I have found that at their core, both require distillation of information and presenting it in a clear and ideally unbiased manner to whoever the audience might be.

For people who weren’t alive in 1984, or who don’t know the case, can you walk us through what actually happened on the subway car and why it became the story that it became?

I’ve found in my informal focus grouping that pretty much anybody born before 1978 knows the story. Many, if not most, New Yorkers have at least heard of it. And then maybe like a third of law students know the story.

But in simplest form, Bernhard Goetz shot and seriously wounded four unarmed Black teenagers on the New York subway. He ultimately ended up getting acquitted of all violent crime charges and just convicted of a gun possession offense.

But the big thing in the case is that he really became almost a cause célèbre for public safety in New York. The city was very rough at the time with homicide and violent crime rates through the roof. It was fiscally mismanaged. It was broke and seeking bailouts from the federal government. It was just a rough time in New York City history. And many people saw Bernhard Goetz as a kind of avenging hero in the mold of the 1970s vigilante films like “Death Wish.” So he really became the face of a fed-up public, not universally, of course. And there was an unmistakable racial backdrop to the case wherein certainly civil rights leaders and many in the public recognized that if this were a Black man shooting white kids, the story would be totally different and the public reaction would have been totally different.

A lot of how this was framed had to do with the New York Post. They’re the ones who branded him as “The Subway Vigilante” and kind of kept the story alive. How much of what the public understood about the case was really a media construction?

To some extent, it was a media construction. I don’t entirely blame the New York Post for it. However, the New York Post played, let’s say, an invaluable role in shaping all coverage of crime and safety in New York at the time, [and] certainly around this case.

At the time that Rupert Murdoch purchased the Post, it actually had been a somewhat left-leaning publication. And he helped lead the Post into a more tabloid-style sense of sensation. It was under his leadership that Page Six, the gossip column, ultimately got added to the paper.

A lot of that extended to public safety and how the public felt. There were a lot of stories about crime and safety and “city under siege” and so on. Now, I say it wasn’t just the New York Post because the other tabloids also came along with the Post. And so as the Post got more salacious and focused on safety and crime and being under siege, the Daily News and Newsday and others did as well. And it ended up being a winning financial strategy for the papers. They reminded the public how scared the public was. The public then felt more scared, [and] turned to newspapers … just like today with the internet — people are motivated to seek out information that agitates them. And so it is impossible to decouple the media influence on this story from how the public saw Bernhard Goetz.

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 (like Goetz), 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.

If you take that to today, there’s a line between Goetz and Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny. What has changed when it comes to how these stories get out there and shape public opinion? With social media and the internet, it feels like there’s an opportunity to have a far larger impact than a newspaper could.

I have a two-part answer to that. I think it is remarkable that the support for Goetz was able to be as turbocharged as it was without social media. It should provide a window into how remarkably the public reacted to this story in an era that did not have 24-hour news cycles or Instagram or TikTok or whatever else. It was simply on the basis of newspapers, the public’s genuine agitation about public safety, and desire to elevate this white man into a hero role that created the myth of Bernhard Goetz.

Today, those kinds of stories are all the more common on account of social media … an entire world of communication exists that prioritizes the most sensational information and targets information to people who want it or are willing to keep viewing it and resharing it.

A point I raise in the book is almost an intellectual question of, what if Kyle Rittenhouse did not have TikTok and Instagram? Certainly he could turn on the news and see images of Kenosha, Wisconsin burning, but there’s [probably] something else about the continued feed of information he was receiving that helped contribute to his crossing over into Kenosha to take the actions he did.

And I think I would go even further and say, “How would the reaction to Luigi Mangione have been different without social media?” Certainly many people, millions of people across America, are dissatisfied with their health coverage. But the outpouring of support that he received, I think, would have been completely [different] — people wouldn’t have written letters to the editor heralding Luigi Mangione. Social media created a snowball effect around him. And so simply the existence of all of those forms of media have made the creation of heroes, for lack of a better term, much easier.

The big thing about your book is that you got Goetz for an interview. He doesn’t talk to many people. What was that like?

Well, he and I had emailed a bit. I told him I wished to speak for a book. I picked up the phone and called him at one point. He answered and he just talked for 45 minutes or so. It was a meandering series of thoughts that came out of him.

More than anything else, I was struck by how unrepentant he was. Even if he felt that his shootings were justified, I would have expected some level of self-reflection or analysis: “I felt scared and I was unsafe, comma, however, what happened was a profound tragedy. And I might have even done it again, however, the fact that there’s someone whose life is now irreparably altered by being brain-damaged and paralyzed from the chest down is a tragedy on a host of human levels.” And there was none of that.

I asked him at one point, “Do you believe you committed a public service with the shooting?” And he felt those guys needed to be shot. That was his view. I’m not saying I was surprised by it given how he has sort of approached all of this in the past. But it was still remarkably jarring to hear that come out of someone’s mouth.

There was another book about this that just recently came out. I’ve heard people describe Heather Ann Thompson’s Fear and Fury as almost like an unintentional companion book in that it focused a lot on the teenagers who were shot, while your book includes the Goetz interview. Do you worry that some people might go into it thinking your book is the Goetz side of the story?

No, I think that is entirely a fair question. I will say a few things. One, no one can read my book and think that it legitimizes or platforms Bernhard Goetz, or even makes him at all remotely remarkable. Even where I say that we ought to extend some grace to Bernhard Goetz, there’s been a big “but” and several paragraphs after that [listing] all of the horrible things he said over the years — both to police in New Hampshire, to his neighbors, and then to me — about his unrepentance and bigotry, his use of ethnic slurs, his unlawful firearms possession and purchase, one of which he was ultimately convicted of. And so one cannot read my book and think it is in any way Bernhard Goetz’s side of the story.

To me, it is and was a three-dimensional journalistic look at a very fraught, very complex story, but in no way seeks to elevate someone who broke the law.

Were you aware that Thompson was writing on the same subject? Were you in contact?

No. We [have] communicated since. I found out probably a year into writing the book, and I [didn’t] know what Heather’s timeline was. Of course it’s frustrating as an author to hear initially that another credible, successful author is writing a book on the same subject matter. That said, I think it’s a very fraught, very complex story with many layers to it. And the fact that there are two different but still incredibly rich books on the subject shows that there are other angles to it. Multiple people can find 350 pages of thoughtful, thought-provoking books on the same subject matter. In the end, it’s actually a good thing that there are multiple works on the story.

You’ve written about the legal concept of reasonableness and whether Goetz’s fear was reasonable. As a former prosecutor, how do you think about the fact that reasonable fear so often tracks with racial bias?

I think it’s one of the great fantasies of our criminal justice system that people truly can apply facts to law without fear or favor and in a perfectly neutral manner. Of course they brought their biases into the courtroom. You can’t tell me they did not. The jurors are very defensive over the question of whether they did or didn’t.

But the defense wasn’t shy about stoking the racial biases of the jury by doing things like having big, [blown up] portraits of the four victims. Why [does] the defense [have] these large 24- by 36-[inch] photographs of these victims if not to remind the jury that they’re big, scary Black men? Why did the defense stage a reenactment of the shooting with actors that look nothing like Bernhard Goetz or the conductor, no other passengers in there, except for big, thuggy Black dudes beating up this white man in the court? Why did they do that if not to stoke the racial biases?

So the idea that the jury was somehow able to put this all outside and compartmentalize it in their brains is, I think, ludicrous. Now, in fairness to the jury, they all lived in New York City at the time and were all as scared of the subway as anybody else. And it was just a difficult, tough time. But the idea that they were acting without any sort of consideration, implicitly or in the back of their minds, about race, I think is silly.

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

From a professor at Columbia Journalism School: “drown your kittens.” Regular journalists call it “kill your darlings,” but “drown your kittens.” At some point, you get emotionally attached to things you create that are not the best work that you can put forward and being able to recognize that [is important]. That can apply to everything from paragraphs that you wrote in a book to social media posts that you think are cool. In a world of data that never gets deleted, sure, you can save it and put it somewhere else and admire it one day, but sometimes you just have to let go.

What story — not necessarily your own — are you proudest of having helped bring to the public’s attention?

There’s an anecdote toward the end of the book of him going on the Opie and Anthony show, this pretty vile shock jock show that got canceled for being so vulgar. And having unearthed that — yes, certainly it’s out there, people know it’s there — but I had not seen it reported or written about anywhere. And it’s a remarkable insight into, one, the future of Bernhard Goetz, who this guy became, and two, almost a meditation on notoriety. This is what happens when someone cannot shake his notorious past. It’s a really fascinating story, and I retell it toward the end of the book.

Right now is a pretty rough time for journalists, for people who do long-form reporting. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is encouraging their writers to not actually write their stories anymore, but to use AI to do the writing part. There’s a lot of reasons to feel scared about the future of journalism. Do you have any reason to feel hopeful?

We eventually probably need to make peace with the fact that local media is dying, and maybe not necessarily will die, but local media is struggling and will struggle. But I still think there are aspects of the journalistic process that just cannot be replaced by [AI] — that cannot replace the art and act of human conduct and human interaction.

Now, maybe one day we reach a point in which bots are so sophisticated that they can replace all of us, but there’s just something about talking to live humans that I think — human touch being one of them, shaking hands — is something bots cannot do, AI cannot do, even at its best.

Further reading from Elliot Williams:

• Five Bullets: The Story of Bernie Goetz, New York’s Explosive ‘80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation (Penguin Press, January 2026)

• “The justice system Trump and other white-collar defendants see is different than what most accused criminals get” (CNN, April 10, 2023)

• “The threat Ginni Thomas’ behavior poses to the Supreme Court” (CNN, March 25, 2022)

• “Ginni Thomas went too far” (CNN, Feb. 5, 2021)

• “The ‘Star Wars’ love I’m passing on to my kids” (CNN, Dec. 20, 2019)

Roger Sollenberger never really wanted to be a journalist, but he’s definitely one now. He started out just being interested in covering the rise of Trumpism. Now he’s broken one of the biggest Epstein files stories out there.

Sollenberger was always a writer and cared about politics, but he ended up in journalism by accident. Witnessing the rise of Trump, he started to follow some notable stories coming out of the administration. That curiosity landed him a job at Salon, which then led him to The Daily Beast. Today, he’s doing journalism independently.

In the two years since going independent, Sollenberger has broken some significant stories. His recent Epstein files story revealed the FBI had investigated claims that Trump had sexually abused a minor. And at the end of last year, he published a scoop about Rep. Cory Mills’s (R-FL) connections to a weapons manufacturer.

In the latest edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Sollenberger about going after the big stories as an independent journalist, the trajectory of his career, the state of journalism, and more. —Thor Benson

There are people out there doing independent journalism who get big scoops, but I think it’s harder to do that than when you’re in a newsroom. How have you approached that and what’s your sourcing look like?

With [the Epstein files] story, there wasn’t much in the way of sourcing. It was almost exclusively documents-based reporting. There are sources that I’ve developed in the course of reporting the story, but that’s just using networks and techniques that I developed over time at The Daily Beast.

You can reconstruct the story without needing any special inside sourcing. Of course, it helps to have inside sourcing — if you can have someone go and look at the un-redacted documents, for instance. But this was really just me assembling a narrative that existed in these scattered documents, which cohered over time.

It was astounding to me that the thing that it seemed pretty much everybody was looking for — an allegation against Donald Trump that carried more weight than the frivolous and fantastical and baseless allegations that were on that FBI tip sheet — it’s so weird to me that I happened to be the person to find it. Or at least to find it and be able to pursue it and assemble it into the narrative.

I was pretty sure that big newsrooms had picked everything clean or would be able to pick everything clean. They have teams of researchers and reporters that can afford to just comb through this massive trove of documents for weeks, and I was assuming that that machine was going to filter all the stories out. And then I saw this, and it hadn’t been reported. It was kind of surprising at first, but it’s all right there.

And you had another pretty sizable story not long ago.

I had this story about Cory Mills that was documents-based, but it also took a whole lot of source building and network building. Over the course of reporting that story — which was months of work, talking to hundreds of people, developing trust with members of Congress, developing trust with staffers — I built out a huge network.

I don’t think there are many independent journalists who have the resources to do that. I’m fortunate that I was in a place where I did have the time to stretch my legs and focus on that story and not worry about where my next meal was coming from. My wife had a pretty good job and she was super supportive of me just staying at home and being a dad and kind of doing this work in the background. I thought it was a really important story that I had the time to just be a dog with a bone about and go after. That is rare.

On the flip side of that, I know journalists who work at places that have really deep resources, but they are so overworked and so choked up with the news of the day. It’s dizzying. And perversely, the places that do have the resources don’t seem to be able to afford the time to focus on stories like the Cory Mills story.

It’s a strange set of incentives. It’s hard to capture exactly what the gap is between these worlds of independent journalists or startups and the legacy media or the more well-resourced national news outlets, but there’s definitely a major gap in there that I’ve been able to fill twice. It’s taken a lot of work. It’s a hard road being a freelancer.

Honestly, learn how to read [Federal Election Commission (FEC)] reports. If you learn how to read them for stories, you can find a lot of really interesting reporting from just pulling campaign finance filings. That’s where a whole lot of my reporting stems from. Obviously, not the Epstein stuff, but the Cory Mills stuff.

There are his public disclosures, his ethics disclosures to Congress, the financial disclosures. These publicly available documents [that] don’t require the roll of the dice on a [Freedom of Information Act] request. You learn a lot about a person by what they choose to spend their money on or by who they hire or by who they raise money from. These transactions aren’t just numbers signifying “XYZ.” There are stories there. There’s a reason somebody donates money to somebody. Sometimes those stories are more significant than other times.

More from from Depth Perception:

Your career has had an interesting trajectory. I feel like it kind of reflects the industry. You went from Salon to The Daily Beast. Now you’re doing some independent work. How’s it felt navigating the industry as all these changes have been happening?

I became a journalist sort of accidentally. I have an MFA in fiction writing, funnily enough. I was teaching college English, and I was a musician, and I was just kind of finding different ways to make a living and afford my rent. I had always felt emotionally invested in democracy and in politics, and that comes from my family history. I just sort of felt that the Trump era was something that I needed to write about.

I think it was 2019 that I landed my first real reporting gig. I got Rudy Giuliani’s phone number and wrote some reports. I enjoyed it. I thought it was fun to figure things out and to talk to people and provide information and perspective that I thought was important. And then I just became a reporter after that. I didn’t come into journalism intentionally, and I didn’t come to journalism traditionally. I worked really fucking hard, though.

At Salon, I was doing three to four aggregation write-ups a day. At the same time, I was doing independent, original reporting. I wanted to do that, and I made a role for myself at Salon. I came up with a story and they trusted me, and they published it. They’re like, “Yeah, do another one.” So I did another one, and I worked like 80-hour weeks for about a year.

I went from Salon to The Daily Beast, and the workload, the content demand, dropped down. Instead of three to four [pieces] a day, it was three to four a week, which is still a lot for original reporting. That’s a lot of work, and there’s a lot of churn and burnout. It’s a very difficult job for somebody like me who is obsessive about doing the best job.

By 2024, I wasn’t feeling that I was getting a good return for myself — personally, emotionally, psychologically — for my investment in that work. I just kind of didn’t feel like I fit in the industry anymore, so I took a break, and it’s been good for me to take a break.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to cut through the noise of the news and find a story that would do really well at pretty much any other era in American politics and have editors turn it down. It’s getting really hard to place stories as a freelancer, not just in my experience, but from the people that I’ve talked to. They’re competing with the largest news machine in American history: the Trump administration. As a freelancer, you have to find something really special to get that placed in a national outlet if you want to compete just with the Trump administration.

Substack is gaining a lot of momentum, broadly, and there’s so much great reporting there. But individually, it’s this long tail effect where the individual stories might not get the attention they deserve, simply because they’re on Substack.

And you broke the Epstein story on Substack, which is a big piece to publish yourself. Can you tell me about the timeline of you discovering this thing, deciding to write about it and then it getting picked up by major outlets?

I published the first story on a Sunday evening, and I published five more over the course of that week. NPR and MSNOW published their confirming reports the Monday after I published. It was like a week and a day, and in that time … I was doing everything I could to ensure that the story got the corroboration and confirmation and attention that it deserved from the national press.

I was happy to see it confirmed. I did not care about being cited as the person who discovered this thing or the person who broke the news. This, to me, was always just a major, major story of potentially generational significance — the cover-up I’m speaking of here — setting the allegations aside.

As Julie K. Brown [the writer who first broke the Epstein trafficking story] always says to me, it takes a village. In this scenario, it is just about how many smart people can I get to care about this story the way I think it should be cared about? I was so happy to see so many smart people take that story to different places, and not just to confirm it, but to push it and help get more revelations. We still don’t have all the documents, but I was just incredibly happy to see this story go to the place where I always thought it would go.

Further reading from Roger Sollenberger:

• “On Trump Accuser Files, DOJ Establishes Pattern of Obstruction” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, March 11, 2026)

• “DOJ Exposed Name of Trump Underage Accuser After She ‘Refused To Cooperate’ Against Him” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, February 23, 2026)

• “Underage Trump Accuser’s Brother Was Arrested For Participating Jan. 6 Riot” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, February 19, 2026)

• “Sex Workers & A Secret Charity: The Story Of Cory Mills’s ‘F*cking Bananas’ Afghanistan Mission” (Roger Sollenberger’s Substack, November 20, 2025)

Don’t call David Sirota a liberal journalist. Ever. Though the journalist and founder of investigative news outlet The Lever often covers people who would label themselves conservative, Sirota is driven by one of journalism’s overarching ideas: to hold the powerful accountable.

“I think those words liberal and conservative, left and right, don’t really mean much of anything. Where I come down is that a journalist’s job is to hold power accountable. In our country, most of the power is held by people who have most of the money, and so the kind of journalism I do is ‘follow the money,’” says Sirota.

In articles, op-eds, books, podcasts, and even a film for Netflix, Sirota’s work details the often labyrinthian and secretive routes that turn out some of the most powerful players in U.S. politics and business. And, as the new season of his podcast, “Master Plan,” showcases, the decades of planning that often occurs behind those ascents.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Sirota talks about what it takes to lay out the facts about the country’s most powerful people, his devotion to transparency and fact checking, and the process of turning cut and dry reporting into a gripping podcast. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. —Jenna Schnuer

Why does the idea of being considered a liberal journalist bother you? You even stepped away from journalism to work for Bernie Sanders during his 2020 presidential campaign.

I don’t see the work that I’ve done in politics as a conflict with the kind of journalism I do. To my mind, it’s all been one long mission to try to hold power accountable and change that unequal power dynamic. To throw around the idea that this person’s a liberal journalist or this person’s a conservative journalist, or that the people who work at The New York Times or The Washington Post, in theory, don’t have any politics at all, they don’t have any belief system at all, I think that’s kind of bullshit.

I’m a pretty open book about my basic, core viewpoint beliefs. I don’t think we’re trying to hide that. I do think there’s a difference between having a viewpoint and skewing one’s reporting. Our reporting is fair and accurate, because most of it, if not all of it, is document based. So you don’t have to agree with my viewpoint or what you perceive my politics to be, because what we’re doing at The Lever is following the money and reporting the actual facts. The demonstrable, verifiable facts.

One of the things that we adhere strictly to is we provide the reader as much of an ability to fact check us as possible. So when you read our stories, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of hyperlinks [to the documentation]. You can verify that what we’re telling you is accurate. It may offend your partisan sensibilities, and we have run into that where people don’t want to believe bad things about the political party that they personally affiliate with, or the politicians that they’ve been inculcated to worship. So there can be pushback to what we report, because people are offended by the idea that we surface facts about all different kinds of political players, regardless of party. But the facts are the facts, and we think it’s our job to surface as many of those facts to try to hold power accountable as possible.

Tell me about “Master Plan.” It’s an ambitious podcast.

What we try to do every season is look at a problem or a social political dynamic and what caused it. We essentially reject the idea that most of what we’re living in is an anomaly or brought about by one person, for instance, Donald Trump.

So season one was about the master plan to legalize corruption in America. For season two, we’re [looking at] concentrating presidential power and turning the presidency into a monarch. The idea that everyone woke up a few years ago and one guy decided to be corrupt or try to turn the presidency into a king? That’s a nice story for liberal media to tell liberal fans of the Democratic Party, but that is a fraudulent history. That is not what actually happened.

In season one, we told the story of how over 50 years, there was a deliberate movement to deregulate our campaign finance laws, narrow anti-bribery laws down to make them unenforceable, and that this was carried out in a very coordinated, focused fashion, through the courts, through politics, through the Citizens United decision. None of that was random. That was all part of a detailed master plan.

This season, we’re taking a look at the concentration of executive power to the point where many are fearing that the presidency is becoming a monarch, an all-powerful king. Obviously, the office of president is one powerful branch of government. It always has been. What we’re looking at is, how did it become, seemingly, the most powerful in an absurdly out of balance, disproportionate way, way beyond where it had been in many years of our history? And the story starts after Watergate, where so much of our modern era does.

The system that [Donald Trump is] exploiting was built for him over many decades, ignoring the warnings of many people, and it was built for a specific reason. I think that’s the important thing here. The legalization of corruption from season one of “Master Plan” and turning the presidency into a monarchy in season two, these are assaults, really, on “small d” democracy. Democracy for the master planners or the king makers is seen as a problem, not a solution to problems.

LISTEN: Another award-winning history podcast made for this moment

How did America get the far right so wrong? What will it take now to get it right? These are some of the most existential questions facing the U.S. today, and the answers can be found in the last 40 years of American history.

The Ruby Ridge raid, the Waco siege at the Branch Davidian compound, the Oklahoma City bombing, the Jan. 6 insurrection… these are all explosive moments from recent decades. But connect the dots between these — and other — seemingly disparate, violent events, and you’ll see a thread of history that’s vitally relevant to our current political climate.

Crackling with rich archival tape and riveting eyewitness and expert interviews with Pulitzer-finalist host Garrett Graff, Long Lead’s Edward R. Murrow Award-winning podcast Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right helps listeners understand why the fringe is overrunning the mainstream, conspiracy theorists have captured offices in Congress, and peaceful protests turned into riots. How did we get here? Listen to Long Shadow to find out.

How many people are on the “Master Plan” team?

We have four on the core team in terms of the reporting and the producing. We have another person who works for The Lever, who also happens to be a terrific musician, who does the scoring. We have fact checkers, we have legal [reviewers]. It ends up involving anywhere from seven to 10 people.

This is going against what is happening in the podcast industry, [which] is turning into kind of like talk radio, where it’s just two-way interviews. What we’re losing are deeply reported, longform, multi-episode series that can really unpack a topic in a proper way. These are more expensive to produce, more time consuming to produce, and they ask the listening public to devote a lot of time to them.

[Longform podcasts require] active listening. If you miss something, you have to actually rewind. What I worry about and lament is that a short attention span culture is not as interested anymore in longer-form storytelling. And I’m not concerned about that just for my own work. I’m concerned about that for society at large. If we can’t concentrate on anything, that’s an existential problem for human civilization.

So how do you make a longform show that appeals to a short attention span public?

For creators, it should push us to meet the world where it is as much as we can. We have really worked hard to make [the show] as entertaining as possible. We’re putting you right in the scene of history. I don’t even like the idea of storytelling. It’s really “story showing.” That’s the old idea in journalism. The most powerful stories are the ones that show you; they don’t tell you. So we’re putting the listener in the room, in the scene.

How do you get sources to talk to you for “Master Plan?” It seems like it could be dangerous for some people to speak on the record.

Getting the central characters to talk to us has been difficult and, at times, impossible. Sometimes they’re not even alive. So what we rely on are some interviews [from] the past to really bring them alive, as well as biographies, etc. Everything, obviously, is grounded in what’s been reported, what we can document and what we can verify. A lot of the people who were involved in these things don’t want to talk. I mean, the master plans that we’re revealing were secret for a reason, right? So we are piecing together the story from all of the verifiable documents and sources that we can and so getting somebody who was there in the room, if you will, is a bonus for us.

Long Lead

Long Lead makes history at the Webby Awards

Last week, the Webby Awards announced its annual winners, and Long Lead was awarded its eighth Webby in the past 5 years. Each of the Webby Awards we’ve won has been a tremendous honor, but this one was historic: Winning the 2026 prize for “Best Individual Editorial Feature” earned…

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What’s it like for you to report these stories? So much of what we learned as kids has been blown apart because of these people in the background who hold the power and built the power.

It’s been an eye opening process. I think how little we understand about our own recent history is genuinely disturbing. Part of the exciting goal of this [show] is to bring that history back to life, not for its own sake, but for us to understand how we got here, so that perhaps, if we wanted to, we would make different decisions. To my mind, my lifetime has overlapped with us making the same set of decisions over and over again [with] many things getting worse and worse and worse. I’m 50 years old. I feel like I’ve lived through the definition of insanity.

Do you think people really want to put in the hard work it would take to change things?

It’s kind of mind boggling, actually. We are a society [that has] effectively, “memory holed” the Iraq War. We have “memory holed” the financial crisis. The same people who engineered those disasters and crises were effectively rewarded with stature, wealth, and media platforms. No one has really paid any kind of even mild social status price for two of the things that have caused mind boggling levels of damage.

And I pick out just those two examples because the fact that we’ve “memory holed” them, they weren’t that long ago. We’re still living through the effects of them. I would say Donald Trump, in a sense, is a reaction — sort of a terrible, catastrophic, destructive reaction, but a reaction, [and] a political reaction, nonetheless — to those things. And the scary thing is that if you can “memory hole” the Iraq War and the financial crisis, your society, basically, can “memory hole” anything.

Further listening, reading, and viewing from David Sirota:

• “Master Plan” season 1 (Released Aug. 13, 2024, The Lever)

• “Master Plan: The Kingmakers” season 2 (Released March 16, 2026, The Lever)

• “Bari Weiss’s ascent at CBS News was 50 years in the making” (The Guardian, Oct. 12, 2025)

• Master Plan (Sept. 2025, Lever Books)

• Don’t Look Up (Netflix, Released in 2021)

As is often the case, G. Elliott Morris worked for big publications before he went independent. That does give you some credibility before you go out on your own, though, and credibility is extremely important, especially when it comes to polling.

Morris’ newsletter, Strength In Numbers, is a widely recognized and respected source of new polling data. Morris started as a data journalist the better part of a decade ago at The Economist, then moved on to work at ABC News and polling analysis website FiveThirtyEight. Now, he’s doing things his own way with this newsletter.

There are some big advantages to being able to do your own polls and focus on what you think is important, according to Morris. In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with him about what it’s like competing with the big guys, what he’s learned from the questions he’s asked voters, and how things are changing in the world of polling. —Thor Benson

You’re part of an industry that is filled with big names — Reuters, YouGov, the AP, Gallup. How does it feel to kind of be a lesser known, but influential voice in the polling world? You have experience with the big companies, but you’re doing this independently.

Well, you frame it as a potential downside, but I think it’s actually quite an upside in a couple of ways. I’m just talking about running polls that are financed through a model of independent journalism, rather than whatever mainstream news networks are financed by these days.

The first advantage is I can ask pretty much whatever I want at a pace that works for me in producing journalism. That process is incredibly streamlined in a one- or two- or three-person operation, versus the way that this has traditionally worked, where you come up with some idea of the things that are important to ask right now, and those get filtered through several layers of bureaucracy.

It becomes the 22nd segment on “Good Morning America” or whatever. They’re balancing the other priorities of the organization, which most of the time are really far removed from the journalistic questions. What do people care about from a “small d” democratic point of view? I feel like I’m doing polling that is much closer to what people care about now. I don’t have a bunch of incentives working against me in the broader organization that I had before. It’s just easier to do when you don’t have an institution bringing the boot down on your neck.

For sure. How is it competing with those big name organizations, though? People are used to seeing their polls, and they pretty much trust them. They might not be familiar with your work.

Traditional media organizations still have a lot of purchase when it comes to sharing information, which is a source of frustration. There’s a hesitancy to believe what independent journalists are putting out there. There’s a belief in the public, rightly or wrongly, that institutions still have some layers of fact checking and standards and credibility. From my experience, that is a very dubious assumption on the part of the public. That is a downside to the independent journalism model.

I spend a lot of time doing what is essentially reputation building. That involves me giving interviews to people, like you, but also a lot of the stuff that I would normally do, which is sharing as much information about the process of polling as possible. I think I have an advantage in that I wrote a book about surveys, but it’s still hard to get attention to these surveys sometimes. There are lots of traditional journalists, as opposed to independent journalists, who are really into what I’m doing at Strength In Numbers.

I’ve seen you call out how people have misread data. For instance, people assume Democrats moving to the right benefits them electorally. How do you approach that?

Those are built on assumptions about politics and voter psychology, not data. I guess there’s some data that people will use to make these arguments on occasion, but for the most part, I find it to be a misreading of voter psychology that is actually rooted in ignorance of the data.

The advantage of independent journalism is that I’ve assembled an audience of people that really care about getting questions like this correct. There’s the old 1,000 true fans model of independent media from the guy who founded Wired. Strength In Numbers is more than 1,000 poll sickos who believe that these arguments are important to make and that you can get in the weeds. These are not the type of arguments or articles I’d be able to write in a traditional outlet, because of all those other incentives I mentioned earlier.

So I’m really lucky that the audience supports the work, but it’s really as simple as doing the work the right way and continuing to justify it to the audience. Do your work the right way, and the audience is there.

Yeah, you’re able to ask whatever questions you want. I’m sure that’s kind of fun to experiment with. What have been the most interesting findings you’ve had recently, or maybe the past six months?

This was in either the very first or second poll that I ran in Strength In Numbers with our polling partner… I did an experiment on how voters were reacting to information about the kidnapping of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. So people who were reading the news at the time would recall there was some debate over whether or not members of Congress should draw attention to this. Chris Van Hollen, a senator from Maryland, went down to El Salvador to try to interview — and did get some time with — Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

The reaction in the House of Representatives was, “Don’t go down there and draw attention to this.” So my thing was, let’s root this conversation in data. Are voters actually responding to this negatively, in terms of how they were viewing the Democrats? Is going down to El Salvador, in this case, turning voters against the Democrats? Or does this actually increase support for what Democrats are arguing for, which was, at the time, less leeway for the government to deport pretty much whoever they wanted in violation of federal law?

So we did a survey experiment where half of the respondents were asked first, “Do you support the administration’s actions on mass deportations?” And then they were given a question that was more of a priming of information that said, “Here’s what just happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia — do you think he should be returned home?” So half of the poll saw the questions in that order: First, how do you feel about deportations, and then how do you feel about Garcia? And the other half of the poll got this in reverse.

We saw a large increase in support for the Democratic position for people who were told or heard about Garcia before being asked about mass deportations. So we could write this article and really root the discourse in some data. That was not the type of poll that we could have run at ABC News or FiveThirtyEight. There was no buy-in on running survey experiments and trying to explain that to an audience of mostly boomers who fell asleep on their couch at 5 p.m. watching the local weather.

But it is the type of thing that you can write up for people who have self-selected into spending time with the data and taking discourse about politics seriously, rather than ideologically, first.

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What do twins know that the rest of us don’t? Something clearly important since they tend to live longer than the rest of us. While the data behind that fact is clear, the reasons aren’t, so Long Lead creative director Sarah Rogers decided to ask them in Double Meaning, a portrait and photo essay exploring the people who attend the annual Twins Day festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.

But get this: Double Meaning is actually a double-feature. Tucked inside is Twins Fest, a documentary film short by filmmaker Kate Bennis that was recently named an honoree at the Webby Awards and “Best Documentary Feature” and “Video of the Year” by the Society of Publication Designers.

To top it all off, Twins Fest is a contender for “Best Documentary Film Short” by the Telly Awards! Please vote for Twins Fest in the Telly Awards today. And if you have a twin — or some friends! — tell them to vote, too. After all, two votes is better than one.

Something I’ve been noticing, and I’m sure you have too, is CNN and others are starting to incorporate prediction markets into their reporting. I’ve seen a lot of popular figures in politics say this could replace polling. What do you think about that?

Prediction markets are valuable sources of information to an extent. The theory is that they are valuable when there are enough people willing to put their money where their mouth is and where those people are informed about the thing they are trying to predict. But those are not conditions that are actually satisfied in prediction markets all of the time. So you do get some pretty big errors that you might not get with polls. They’re not foolproof.

On the empirical question of whether or not they are, even while not being foolproof, better than polls on average, the literature, which really predates things like Polymarket and Kalshi, had pretty mixed reviews of prediction markets. It found that they were really good on stuff like who’s going to win the presidential election but really bad on stuff like what vote share these candidates are going to get. And especially once you get down to the House or sometimes the governor level, then the amount of information being aggregated is not enough to make the prediction markets better than the polls.

They are marketing themselves as oracular distillers of all the information in the world about some subject. That just frankly doesn’t pass the bullshit detector. When you look at it, there are also some huge predictive errors on questions that are really, really important, like who is going to be the next pope. I think the prediction markets gave the eventual pope a 2% chance of winning at most, usually closer to 1%. So if you are the oracle at Delphi, that’s a pretty bad track record.

In an election context, they can be biased by what we call “whales,” or people with a lot of money entering the market. And then the aggregation principle is no longer satisfied. So the whole argument for why you would want to trust the market is invalidated when there’s not a whole lot of money in the market and one person, which we can sometimes call dumb money, ruins the market.

So even if they are good at predicting elections, I think they fail at the thing that they’re trying to be, which is like a new kind of news engine, right? Kalshi is like, “You don’t need to go to CNN, all you need to do is follow our markets. They tell you everything you need to know about the world.” Or like on election night, “You don’t need to watch the statistical model at The New York Times, you can just watch the Kalshi odds.” And those odds can end up being wrong.

Further reading from G. Elliott Morris:

• “Trump approval falls to 35% as rating on handling prices hits a record -46” (Strength In Numbers, April 21, 2026)

• “Poll: 1 out of 8 Trump voters has buyer’s remorse about 2024” (Strength In Numbers, March 27, 2026)

• “Why we trust real polls over prediction markets” (Strength In Numbers, March 26, 2026)

• “Trump has lost working-class whites” (Strength In Numbers, March 17, 2026)

Margaret Sullivan knows what it’s like to be a burr under the saddle of The New York Times. She did it for three-and-a-half years.

As the paper’s fifth public editor from 2012 to 2016, Sullivan fielded hundreds of emails per week from readers, took their complaints to editors who didn’t always want to hear them, and published her conclusions in the paper itself. Sometimes The Times was right. Sometimes it wasn’t. Either way, readers had someone inside the building who would actually pick up the phone.

Then The Times killed the position.

The stated reason was that social media had made the role unnecessary. Sullivan doesn’t buy it. “I don’t see any relationship between that and people tweeting ‘The New York Times sucks,’” she tells Depth Perception. “Those are just two very different things.”

But she gets it — sort of. When her publisher at The Buffalo News once floated the idea of creating an ombudsman, her first instinct was to shut it down. “I said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. We don’t want that.’” She tells this story about herself all the time, she says, because she’d rather get out ahead of it than have someone else call her a hypocrite. But a local paper in Buffalo, she argues, is a different animal than the most influential media organization in the world.

Sullivan spent 32 years at The Buffalo News, starting as a summer intern in 1980 and eventually running the 200-person newsroom for more than a decade until 2012. After The Times, she became The Washington Post‘s media columnist for six years, then left on her own terms in 2022. “It’s a good thing I left when I did, obviously, because the place — I mean, I don’t think it was cause and effect. I did not cause the disaster,” she says. “But I think I did kind of see it coming a little bit.”

These days, she directs her attention at the whole industry from outside of it, writing a weekly column for The Guardian US and her Substack Newsletter, American Crisis, from her home in New York City. She’s written two books, served on the Pulitzer Prize Board, directed the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia, and won multiple awards for defending First Amendment principles. She is, in other words, one of the best-credentialed media critics in the country. And she’s worried.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Sullivan about the death of the public editor, billionaire media ownership, and whether Substack is a real alternative to institutional journalism or just a lifeboat for people who already had careers elsewhere. The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Parker Molloy

When you look at the arc of your career, does it feel like a logical progression, or does each move surprise you?

The biggest surprise, really, is that I spent 32 years at basically my hometown paper in Buffalo. I came there as a kid. I did a lot of different jobs. I became the top editor. And I really thought I was going to [stay] in Buffalo.

But I always had this notion that I would like to be either the ombudsman of The Washington Post or the public editor of The New York Times. I felt like that would be something I would be good at. And I like to do jobs that I can be good at. So one day I read that the job of public editor at The Times was going to be open, and I went after that job with everything I had.

And then, as you know, it’s a difficult job. Somebody called it the worst job in journalism because you’re dealing with the people who work at The New York Times, who have this weird combination of imposter syndrome and also being very impressed with the fact that they’re at The Times. So criticism does not go over really well. And that is the job of a public editor, to do that.

To answer your question more directly, did I think when I was a young journalist, “Oh, I want to be a media critic someday?” No, I had no idea what that would even mean. But it has kind of developed from there. And I guess, oddly enough, this is my specialty.

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This year The Age of Incarceration, Long Lead’s portrait and interview feature with some of the last survivors of the U.S. Japanese detention camps, was also nominated for “Best Individual Editorial Feature.” The nomination is an honor, but winning it four straight years would cement our small studio as a force in journalism. Please vote for The Age of Incarceration in the Webby Awards today. Voting closes in hours!

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The Times abolished the public editor role in 2017. The rationale was that social media had made it redundant, that anyone could tweet their criticism at the paper. Nine years later, do you buy that argument?

No, I absolutely don’t. And I didn’t buy it then, because I did the job. It’s not just about people tweeting at The Times. It was readers writing to someone internal who took it seriously. I would take their criticism and go to whoever the editor was and say, “I’ve gotten 25 letters about this, and it does seem like a legitimate criticism. What do you say about that?” Then I would get their answer, I would write a piece where I would quote the readers, quote the response from The Times, and then synthesize that and come up with what I think.

I found out quickly that I had to do that. I couldn’t just present the criticism and the answer. What people wanted from me was to be kind of like a judge and say, “I’ve looked at this, I’m a somewhat reasonable person, and this is the conclusion I have.” Some of my conclusions were really highly critical of The Times. And then that piece would run in The New York Times, where readers could find it.

I don’t see any relationship between that and people tweeting “The New York Times sucks.” Those are just two very different things.

From the public’s point of view, people want to understand the process better. “Why is this an unnamed source? Why is the headline changing all the time?” Those questions could be answered in ways that help restore trust, but it feels like a lot of these organizations are closing off more, not less.

Exactly. And even for The New York Times, the public editor acted as kind of a steam valve. If there was a ton of criticism, and they were under fire, there was a way to let out some of the steam and say, “Yes, we’re taking this seriously. And here’s our public editor airing the problem.” It might not make everybody feel good, but it did make people feel like they had some recourse. For example, if they were seeking a correction and they were told, “We’re not going to correct that,” they could come to me. And if it rose to the level, I could say, “Well, what gives? Why aren’t you correcting this? It looks like it’s wrong.”

You’ve written about “an increasing self-importance and sense of self-congratulation” at The Times. You pointed to the Mamdani coverage specifically, and you wrote for The Guardian during the campaign that The Times seemed to be trying to wreck his mayoral bid. You discussed with Paul Krugman how the paper didn’t even rank Mamdani in its ranked-choice recommendations. What do you think is driving that coverage?

Nobody there would ever admit that they have been unfair to Mamdani. I heard there was a staff meeting in which some staffers brought up the coverage and brought up what I had written about it and said, “You know what, that’s right.” But in terms of the leadership or the hierarchy, they’re like, “Nope, we cover everybody the same.”

What do I think is really the reason? The Times is a powerful institution, and it “gets” that institutional power. They get a Cuomo. They don’t really get a Zohran Mamdani. And I think there’s a deep discomfort with it. I also think they’re thinking, “This guy really doesn’t have much experience. It is our responsibility to hold his feet to the fire, to really scrub his background, to really examine how he’s governing. And that is our job.” So I think there’s a disconnect there.

It kind of reminds me of during the first Trump campaign, in 2015 and 2016. The Times was very, very tough on Hillary Clinton. They just would not let go of her email sins — supposed sins. And when Jim Comey came back eight days before the election and said, “Oh, we’re going to reopen this FBI investigation,” it was almost the whole front page of The New York Times. And it did not help her.

All of that extremely critical coverage of her was explained as, “Well, she’s going to be the president, and we’ve got to make sure that we’ve really investigated her so that no one can ever say that we were in her pocket.” But we got Donald Trump instead. Twice. So it’s like the law of unintended consequences.

In your interview with Krugman, you said that you think we’ve turned “some kind of weird corner,” where the extremely wealthy are controlling society in a way they weren’t before. Do you think there’s a version of billionaire ownership that works for journalism, or has the experiment basically failed?

I’ve worked for two billionaires. So I feel like I have billionaire insight.

I worked for Warren Buffett, indirectly, who owned the paper in Buffalo. And he was very hands-off. He never called us up and said, “Please endorse this person or that person.” But ultimately, he sold all of his papers. And that was very bad for all those papers. And what was the motivation there? Well, the motivation is what it always is for billionaires.

Then Bezos at The Washington Post, he was the good Jeff Bezos during those years. And then somehow, he turned some kind of weird corner. I think it’s just because they’re looking out primarily for their commercial interests, whether it’s Blue Origin or the shareholders at Berkshire Hathaway. That is what drives the train.

And unfortunately, there’s more and more ownership of media companies by these extraordinarily rich people. Larry Ellison, one of the truly richest people in the world, and his son, David Ellison — they are changing CBS radically. They probably will be able to do the same to CNN. And ultimately, you have these guys who are not interested in the First Amendment. They’re not interested in press freedom. They’re not interested in holding powerful people accountable, because they’re the powerful people who don’t want to be held accountable. It’s actually really, really troubling.

I won’t say it’s like, “Oh, you can’t do the right thing if you’re really rich.” In Boston, the owners of The Globe, the owners of The Minnesota Star-Tribune, those are local rich people who are actually letting their news organizations thrive. But in general, these people who are at the top of the money pyramid, their interests just aren’t about mission-driven, Watergate-style journalism. That is just nothing they’re interested in.

View and vote: Long Lead’s “double” feature needs you

What do twins know that the rest of us don’t? Something clearly important since they tend to live longer than the rest of us. While the data behind that fact is clear, the reasons aren’t, so Long Lead creative director Sarah Rogers decided to ask them in Double Meaning, a portrait and photo essay exploring the people who attend the annual Twins Day festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.

But get this: Double Meaning is actually a double-feature. Tucked inside is Twins Fest, a documentary film short by filmmaker Kate Bennis that was recently named an honoree at the Webby Awards. This week, it was also nominated for “Best Documentary Feature” and “Video of the Year” by the Society of Publication Designers and “Best Documentary Film Short” by the Telly Awards.

Please vote for Twins Fest in the Telly Awards today. And if you have a twin — or some friends! — tell them to vote, too. After all, two votes is better than one.

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A lot of really good media criticism is happening on Substack right now. But there’s no institutional check on quality. Do you see Substack as a genuine alternative to institutional media, or more as a lifeboat for people who already had careers somewhere else?

It does seem to have been a lifeboat for a lot of people. You see people, they’re fired or they leave out of some sort of scruples one day, and they’re on Substack the next day, and they seem to be doing pretty well there.

I do think that legacy newsrooms have something that individual voices don’t have, whether they’re on Substack or elsewhere, which is legal departments [and] editors who are willing to let them go off for six months and do a huge mind-blowing project. You can’t do that if you’re on Substack. You have to produce, produce, produce.

And a lot of what we see on Substack and similar places is opinion. Now, opinion is fine, but opinion has to be based on something. And a lot of what it’s based on is the reporting that’s being done still by The Washington Post, by [The Associated Press], by Reuters. That’s what people are getting outraged about and getting all of their followers worked up about. So what happens when those legacy news organizations can no longer make it because everybody’s decamped over here? I don’t know. It’s a situation that is evolving, and I don’t think we know how it’s going to play out.

What do you think the future of local journalism looks like?

It’s got to be a patchwork. And it’s not all bad that there’s not one dominant newspaper in town who gets a say. Because the voice they were speaking with tended to be a middle-aged or older white male voice. That’s who the editorial board was. That’s who the publisher was. That’s who the owner was. So it’s not all bad that some of the power has seeped away there.

I use Buffalo as kind of my little lab because I understand it so well. What was a 200-person newsroom is down to probably less than 50. And that’s typical around the country. But there’s a nonprofit site called Investigative Post that does good work. There’s radio. There’s four television stations. And while everybody’s struggling, none of them are fat and happy with 35% profit margins the way The Buffalo News used to have, literally. But they are all working toward presenting some sort of reality to the populace.

What’s keeping you up at night?

When I see what Trump is doing, particularly with this war, it’s so worrisome. I really think we’re on the brink of complete disaster.

What’s making you hopeful right now?

When I see all these people protesting out in the streets, when I see people organizing, when I see writers who clearly care a lot, and when I see people doing important cultural work, like in the arts, that all makes me feel like all is not lost.

If someone is graduating from college in 2026 and wants to be a journalist, what do you tell them?

Try to have very diverse skills. Be able to do a lot of different things. Don’t just think, “Oh, I’m a radio person” or “I’m a this or that.” You have to be able to pivot. Get whatever paid work you can. Don’t be fussy. Go get an internship. Be willing to travel and work the contacts. Nothing matters more in any workplace than relationships.

Further reading from Margaret Sullivan:

• “In praise of an utterly human, definitely non-AI voice” (American Crisis, March 31, 2026)

• “It’s great that the NYT is thriving. But I have a worry.” (American Crisis, March 17, 2026)

• “AI-generated Iran images are widespread. How do we know what to believe?” (The Guardian, March 14, 2026)

• “Talking With Margaret Sullivan” (conversation with Paul Krugman on his Substack, Nov. 15, 2025)

• “Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid?” (The Guardian, July 7, 2025)

• Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (Columbia Global Reports, 2020)

• Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2022)

At 32 years old, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s literary influence was solidified when his second nonfiction book, Stamped from the Beginning, burst upon the scene. The 600-page work chronicling the history of racist ideas in America won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was swiftly named one of the best books of 2016 by The Washington Post. From there, Kendi would go on to author or co-author another 15 titles, including a handful of children’s books designed to help families start the conversation about institutional racism accessibly, cementing himself as one of the most widely read historians of his generation.

Why children’s books? Kendi maintains that so much of the racial violence seen not only in the United States, but abroad is underscored by the insidious grip of racist misinformation. Through this, he turns toward the high-profile mass shootings in recent years that this misinformation has inspired: “in Buffalo, Charleston, Christchurch in New Zealand, Munich, El Paso,” he lists off to me.

“In many cases, the perpetrators … were young, in certain cases just 18 years old, literally fresh from school. When I think about that, I always think about what would have happened to that young person if they had been exposed to a book like How to Raise an Antiracist or something like Stamped. Potentially lives could have been saved,” he says.

Enter his newest book, released March 17. Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age picks up where Stamped left off, looking beyond the stories racism tells and into the deeper, structural roots of racism’s beginnings. In other words, it traces the long historical thread of the so-called Great Replacement Theory from its place in the margins of society to what Kendi calls one of the most dominant political theories of today.

Throughout his body of work, and particularly in his most recent project, Kendi proves time and again that racism is not history we look back upon with wiser eyes, but a force that continues to mutate, alive and deeply ingrained within the most powerful political institutions here in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Wouldn’t it be easy, then, to despair? A half-decade ago, a profile in The Washington Post described Kendi as “uncommonly hopeful,” a label that raised my eyebrows and, given everything that has unfolded in the years since, begged revisiting. When I asked him for the latest edition of Depth Perception whether that description still fit, he didn’t hesitate. — Kelly Kimball

Some time ago, you had a profile in The Washington Post in which the writer described you as “uncommonly hopeful.” That was around 2019. Now, in 2026, do you still feel uncommonly hopeful?

I feel just as hopeful, but my hope is largely derived from a philosophical belief that we have to be hopeful in order to bring about change. I really admire the people who are able to get up every day and work hard to bring about change they don’t believe is going to happen. I’m not one of those people. I have to actually believe that the impossible is possible in order to fuel myself. That philosophical belief fuels me, and I think it always will, no matter the current state of society.

You rightly describe yourself as a scholar. But early on in your life you studied journalism. What changed along the way? Does journalism undergird some of the ways you think and write about racism?

I decided towards the end of my years in college at FAMU [Florida A&M University] that I … specifically wanted to report on the Black American community. I decided to get my Master’s in African American Studies with the intention of using that degree to be a race and ethnicity reporter. When I arrived in graduate school, I was in a program where I was sitting next to PhD students, and the graduate program was largely geared towards PhD students and students who were interested in becoming academics. So I had the opportunity to really compare the freedom of a scholar versus the freedom of a journalist, and I found that scholars had more freedom to really discern what they wanted to ultimately write about. I think it was that freedom that really drove me to academia.

I think that has helped me when I’m producing scholarship: I know how to write it both for academics and for the general public. Usually academics are not trained in graduate school how to write for the general public, and I felt like I had that training because of my journalism background.

In your new book, Chain of Ideas, you follow the historical thread of the Great Replacement Theory. Why were you drawn to this specific theory? And do you see it as a natural continuation of your previous work or a departure?

I see it as a continuation … of Stamped from the Beginning, which was a history of racist ideas that ends largely in 2008. Chain of Ideas begins its narrative in 2008. What drew me to this book was really curiosity and a desire to understand what was causing more and more people to empower elected officials who were undermining their own livelihoods. It wasn’t enough to simply answer that by saying “racist ideas” — I needed to ask what specific racist ideas were operating in this moment. The more I explored that question, the more I arrived at Great Replacement Theory, and once I arrived there, the research took me around the world.

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The Age of Incarceration, our portrait and interview feature with some of the last survivors of the U.S. Japanese detention camps, was nominated for “Best Individual Editorial Feature,” a prize Long Lead has won the past three years. That alone is an incredible honor, but winning four straight would cement our small studio as a force in the journalism industry. Please vote for The Age of Incarceration in the Webby Awards here.

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Lastly, Twins Fest, the documentary short film that accompanies our photo feature Double Meaning, has been named an Webby Awards Honoree for “Best Documentary Storytelling.” It’s a wonderful piece and the perfect palette cleanser for the current news cycle. You can watch Twins Fest inside Double Meaning or at Long Lead’s YouTube page — but please vote first!

You talk about how this theory is both a political and cultural phenomenon — present in policy, but also in mainstream media. Can you tell us more about what you mean and the specific racist ideas you were able to trace in this book?

Let me first say there are four major protagonists in Chain of Ideas. What I mean by “protagonist” is the individuals who have largely powered the movement that has spread Great Replacement Theory. Great Replacement Theory is this political theory that suggests powerful elites are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives and livelihoods of white people. When we hear phrases like, “immigrants are invading the nation,” that’s an example of Great Replacement Theory. When we hear notions like the white race, with their low birth rates, are dying out, that’s an example. When we hear terms like “Clash of Civilizations” between Christianity and Islam, that’s an example. Two of the major progenitors of Great Replacement Theory have been politicians and theorists — people who can be journalists, writers, or academics — non-elected officials with seismic platforms they use to spread these ideas.

You mentioned that coming from journalism helped you write for everyday people, not just academics. I’m curious why you have adopted so much of your work for children and families. Can you talk more about why that was a big motivation for you?

Writing Chain of Ideas reinforced a decision I made some time ago to also develop anti-racist literature and books on Black history for young people. …because they’re consuming these ideas just as adults are. And as adults, we know how hard it is to unlearn these ideas. It’s actually easier to learn anti-racist ideas than it is to unlearn racist ones. That’s why I’ve become so committed to creating literature for young people.

This idea of Great Replacement Theory, as you’ve rightly noted, is global. I’m wondering if, through your research, there is a meaningful difference between the way it behaves in, say, Europe, and how it behaves in the United States. And since the beginning of Trump’s second term, has it continued to behave differently here versus everywhere else?

It behaves both differently and similarly at the same time. The similarities across nations are that there are three groups: the powerful elites who are apparently facilitating the replacement, the “replacers,” and the group imagined to be replaced. Who those elites are, who those replacers are, and who is being replaced differs across racial, ethnic, and religious contexts. In the United States, the replacers could be immigrants of color, Black people, or Muslims. In Hungary, they could be Muslims, the Roma, or Eastern Europeans. In India, the population imagined to be replaced is the majority Hindu ethnic group, while the Muslim minority are cast as the replacers. That flexibility is what has allowed this theory to spread globally: It can be applied to virtually any national context, because every nation typically has a group in a position of privilege or majority, and all you have to do is argue that group is being replaced.

I think the way it may be different in the United States is that there isn’t one dominant group of replacers. In almost every other country, there’s a primary group imagined to be replacing the so-called privileged group. In the United States, depending on the political moment, it could be African Americans, immigrants from Latin America, immigrants from Asia, Native people, or Muslims. And it has mutated further in the U.S. context: The replacers could also be queer people, trans people, or women. In many ways, the U.S. becomes a melting pot for the many different forms Great Replacement Theory has taken around the world.

How did we get here?

The Ruby Ridge raid, the Waco siege at the Branch Davidian compound, the Oklahoma City bombing, the January 6 insurrection… all explosive moments in recent U.S. history. But connect the dots between these — and other — seemingly disparate, violent events, and you’ll answer some of the most existential questions facing the U.S. today: How did America get the far right so wrong? What will it take now to get it right?

The second season of Long Shadow, the limited series podcast produced by Long Lead and hosted by Garrett Graff, explores how the modern domestic extremist movement grew from a fatal shootout on a mountain top in Idaho and led to a riot on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Crackling with rich archival sound and riveting interviews, this seven-episode limited series examines a thread of history that’s vitally relevant to our current political climate. Listen to Long Shadow wherever you get your podcasts.

You’ve said before that your education in journalism has allowed you to make your work as a scholar more accessible to the masses. Did journalism help you with your latest book, too?

Chain of Ideas would not have been possible without the work of journalists, particularly investigative journalists around the world. To give one example, each section of the book is set in a different country and organized around a particular scene. The scene I chose for Germany — one of the more pivotal countries in the book, because one of the things I show is that Great Replacement Theory is in many ways a neo-Nazi idea — was based on an investigative report by an outlet called Correctiv. They essentially attended a secret meeting in Germany that included major figures from the Great Replacement party, the AfD, in which those gathered discussed what they called “remigration” — what in the U.S.context is called mass deportation. They met to discuss a plan to mass deport immigrants of color, as well as any German they deemed had not successfully assimilated. The story was broken by Correctiv and became a huge story in Germany. It led to debates in Parliament and demonstrations around the country because people were outraged that these individuals were gathering secretly to plan the removal of a large segment of the population.

I’m mentioning this because I would not have been able to write that section without investigative journalism, and that section is critical, because as we’re seeing in the U.S. context, “remigration” is now being considered a solution to the Great Replacement. In this moment, the work of scholars and investigative journalists becomes that much more important in ensuring that democracy can still stand.

Further reading from Dr. Ibram X. Kendi:

• Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age (One World, March 17, 2026)

• Stamped from the Beginning (Nation Books, April 12, 2016)

• How to be an Antiracist (One World, August 13, 2019)

• “There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory” (The Atlantic, July 19, 2021)

• How to Raise an Antiracist (One World, June 14, 2022)

• “‘Should you teach your children about racism? Of course – here’s how” (The Guardian, June 25, 2022)

• “The Book That Exposed Anti-Black Racism in the Classroom” (The Atlantic, February 14, 2023)

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.

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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)