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…

Read more

23 days ago · 2 likes · Long Lead

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.

The Telly Awards: Long Lead 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 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.

Tell the world: You want more journalism that’s worth your time

Every year the Webby Awards do more than just celebrate the best of the web. They’re an annual opportunity for people to push the web forward. When you vote in the Webbys, you’re telling the world what work you want to see more of online.

Over the past four years, Long Lead has been honored with seven Webby Awards — including the prize for “Best Individual Editorial Feature” for an incredible three-straight years.

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!

---

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.

---

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.

The Webby Awards: Long Lead needs you!

Every year, the Webby Awards are important message internet users get to send about what matters to them online. And over the past four years, Long Lead has been honored with seven Webby Awards. This year the stakes are especially high, and we need your help, again. We need your votes!

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.

Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, our limited series podcast exploring the rise and fall of the web, has been nominated for “Best Documentary Podcast.” Long Shadow has garnered a lot of acclaim through the years, but it’s never taken home one of the Webby’s sacred springs. Please vote for Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet in the Webby Awards here.

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.

Coming soon: The latest from Long Lead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which story are you proudest of?

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

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

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

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

Best journalistic advice?

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Anthony Breznican:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did you become a journalist?

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

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

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

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

Long Lead: Journalism without compromise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading and viewing from Jelani Cobb:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you tell me more about the refugee crisis?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading and listening from Elizabeth Flock:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are some specific independent journalists you appreciate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Josh Marshall:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were there moments where you felt protective of the story?

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Frank Shyong:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was hailing gas canisters that night.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Tony Frangie Mawad:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, they offered her a job.

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

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

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

Why did you become a journalist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who brings guns to a protest?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What story of yours do you most regret?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Laura Jedeed:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Lead presents: “An Unnatural Disaster”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

Human stories from Ukraine: Inside The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further viewing and reading from Ben Anderson:

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

• “No Worse Enemy” (Oneworld, 2013)

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

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

• The Interpreters (Vice, 2014)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the “Long Shadow” of American history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further viewing from Ken Burns:

• “The Civil War” (PBS, 1990)

• “Baseball” (PBS, 1994)

• “Jazz” (PBS, 2001)

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

• “Prohibition” (PBS, 2011)

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

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

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

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

Why did you become a journalist?

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

What world do you consider yourself a part of now?

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

How many hours a day do you spend online?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What stories of yours are you proudest of?

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

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

And what story of yours do you most regret?

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

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

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

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

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

What makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

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

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

Further reading and listening from Ryan Broderick:

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

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

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

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

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