The billionaire tech moguls have a plan for our future, and it’s probably not one you’re excited about. They want to automate everything and make us reliant on their products — they’re doing it right now. And as we’ve come to learn in recent years, they’re also not fans of democracy.

That’s what Gil Durán’s reporting is focused on. He’s a California-based independent journalist who writes about tech oligarchs and something called the “network state.” That’s a concept he says these billionaires are obsessed with. It’s essentially a way to run a tech-saturated country like a corporation and is a model supported by influential Silicon Valley figures like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.

Durán’s career spans both journalism and politics. He was a journalist in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before working in California politics for many years. Then in 2018, he went back to journalism. While in the political world, he helped run communications for some of the country’s leading Democrats, including former U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Published this week, Durán’s book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, explores these billionaires’ plans to dismantle democracy and replace it with the network state. It’s gotten a lot of attention as the vision of what these tech leaders are trying to do to the country becomes clearer.

“Thiel has been leaving a trail of breadcrumbs in public for decades now. All my book does is show people that there’s a trail of breadcrumbs, what those breadcrumbs are, what they mean, and where they are intended to lead to,” Durán says.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we talk to Durán about how he got into journalism, how he ended up writing about the tech oligarchs, and what he thinks the future might look like. —Thor Benson

What was the start of your career like, and how did it evolve over time?

I got my first byline in the fifth grade when I won the “My Mom is the Best” contest in my local newspaper, the Tulare Advance-Register in Tulare, California. It was just a little short essay every kid had to do. I won a $25 brunch certificate, which was big in 1987.

That was a lot of money. I got flowers and a microwave, a brand-new gadget back then, which was amazing because we were actually homeless at the time. We sold the microwave to my grandma, I think. But I got a taste of what it was like to be a writer. They ran a little feature on my family.

I was like, “Holy crap, when you’re in the newspaper, suddenly everybody knows who you are.” And from that moment on, I became fixated on newspapers and journals. I read the newspaper every day. I would sometimes hammer out a slug just to be the shape of a quarter, because I couldn’t afford the paper.

Anyway, that was the start of it. And then I was on the newspaper in middle school, where I wrote an editorial that got me kicked out of school for criticizing the principal. That’s where it all started.

I went to the San Jose Mercury News in 1998, and that was the beginning of my journalism career. I wrote for them mostly between 1998 and 2001, with a little break to travel around and stuff because I was young and itching to travel. But then the whole tech thing hit, and the ad revenue [dried up]. I ended up working blue-collar jobs for two years until I met [former California Governor] Jerry Brown when [my job] was literally mopping floors at a building in West Oakland.

I went into politics for 17 years until I got a call in 2018 from someone at the Sacramento Bee who said, “This is a crazy idea, but what would you think of coming back to journalism as the editorial page editor?” It was a massive, massive pay cut. I was literally chilling in Paris for a month, because things get slow in consulting in December, so you’ve got to go somewhere else for a while.

I got on a plane, flew straight to Sacramento, and cut my own damn legs off to go back to journalism. That’s what I’ve been doing since. I was there for a few years. I went to the Examiner, which a rich guy bought. We had a good year where there was investment, and then it all started to slide. I went on my own, which turned out to be the only place I could do the work that I needed to do.

How has independent journalism been for you? What’s that experience been like?

Well, the independent side is pretty scary, because it largely meant supporting myself in order to try to do work on spec that no one was interested in. Even if someone gets interested, you’re talking about a few hundred bucks for potentially months of work. It can be really hard to thread the needle on doing the work you want to do and getting paid to do it. That’s not really what happened in my case.

I made a tremendous investment of my own money to do the work that eventually became my book. There were moments when I thought, “Am I making a really stupid mistake here?” And I’ll be honest, there are days when you’re like, “Let’s just drop this and look for a damn job right now.” I was in politics. I could go make hundreds of thousands of dollars to advise people on what to say in a press release. Journalism is what I want to do, but there are moments where you think, “Is this just a dead end? Am I having a midlife crisis by trying to be an independent journalist?” That’s what it could seem like. But I persevered through that and got some pieces published. Those got a bigger reaction than almost anything else I had even published in a newspaper.

I ended up winding my way back to the whole tech/politics thing. That had troubled me when I was observing it in San Francisco during the recall elections in 2021 [and] 2022. There was something there that I couldn’t quite figure out. Why are these guys so right-wing? Why are they pouring so much money into polarizing the city’s politics?

I ended up circling back to that, and that actually became my focus. I had to give myself the time to find that. That kind of freedom can be a bit uncomfortable. I’m the kind of person who, if I’m relaxing, I feel anxious because I should be doing something. My political and newspaper [lives] taught me to be a workaholic. That’s the meaning of life: to be chasing something always, whether it’s a campaign or an issue or beating someone to the punch on a story.

I’m glad I did it. It all looks great now that I got a book deal and an audience, but there was a lot of trepidation and a lot of uncertainty and a few moments of serious doubt. It’s not easy. I had to be crazy to be an independent journalist. I will say, though, that the newsletter economy has changed things a bit. I’m not making millions of dollars like some people, but I don’t have to rush out and get a job immediately.

The audacity of Elon Musk

The story of the internet — and how it’s been broken — is very much the story of Elon Musk. In 1999, the then 28-year-old South African tech mogul had thinning hair, a baby face, and a little over $300 million in his pocket, which he scored after selling his software company, Zip2, to Compaq computers. “I think the internet is the, the super-set of all media,” he told a reporter around that time. “It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it.”

Nearly 25 years later, in October 2022, he’d buy Twitter for $44 billion and rename it X.com, in a bid to control that super-set he had prophesized decades before. “Feeds were quickly inundated with some of the darkest videos to ever grace the internet,” says Garrett Graff reports in Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. “Videos of real murders, of violent porn, of animals getting hurt and people fighting. Racist rhetoric, misogyny, deepfakes, and viral conspiracy thrived — and Musk was one of the biggest consumers of the content there.”

Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns, this podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before. Across seven episodes, it retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”

The full season of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is available now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

What brought you to the network state/tech oligarch subject matter?

As an expert in California politics, there are very few people with my level of knowledge and the experiences that I’ve had working for Feinstein, Brown, and Kamala Harris. For the first time in San Francisco, I saw something I did not understand, and I was like, “What the hell is that? Where is this coming from?”

That was what it really was for me. I found something I didn’t fully understand. I wanted to understand it, and it took some time, and I can understand why a lot of people want to avoid it. It’s complicated. It’s unusual, but it’s new. I ended up being way ahead of something that a lot more people can see now.

I believe it’s becoming one of the defining stories of American history — the effort by Silicon Valley venture capitalists to seize control of the nation and essentially roll back democracy. But it started with a much simpler question. When I first heard about the network state, there was a woman named Emily Mills, who was a sort of Twitter investigator who kept tweeting these long threads about it.

I thought it seemed a little weird. We’re taught to stay away from things that seem weird. Unfortunately, weird is the times we live in now. I ended up running across a [review of a] book by Quinn Slobodian, a historian, and I didn’t even finish it. I ran upstairs and ordered the book immediately. I read it in a day. It talks about the network state, and that’s not the main portion of the book, but I was like, “Holy shit, it’s real.” I just went on a deep dive and became more and more concerned that these tech oligarchs had been spelling out in public for a long time what they wanted and what they intended to do.

As far as I could tell, nobody was trying to tell that story in a way that would reach a mass audience. After I did a little research for a month, I wrote [to] a bunch of editors and only one got back to me — Jason Linkins at The New Republic. He said, “When can you have this first story? That ended up becoming a five-part series. A lot of it I was learning as I went along.

JD Vance suddenly came into the picture. I’m like, “Holy crap, he’s one of them.” When I started writing about it, I thought this was going to be a bigger concern for everybody in maybe five to 10 years. But when Vance got on the 2024 ticket, it suddenly became relevant.

How was writing the book? How did it develop over the period that you were writing it?

You’re trying to watch what’s happening with one eye and then be in the past and deep reading and writing a book with the other. I had a very tight deadline, like 10 months, which is crazy for a book. I’d never written a book before this. It’s hard.

I mean, it took a lot out of me. My beard is almost all white now. Part of that was good, though, because when I started writing, I [was] like, “Where does this book end?” I had an outline, but I knew that things didn’t necessarily end there.

I took it chronologically in the second draft, and fortunately, Peter Thiel starts talking about the Antichrist nonstop while I’m heading toward the last part of the book. That really gave me a direction to move toward. It really tied it together. My last chapter is called “Antichrist,” and it’s where everything comes together.

[Thiel’s] end phase here is the Antichrist. At the moment he arrives at the height of his power with his protege a heartbeat away from the presidency, with his cronies throughout high levels of government, he starts preaching nonstop about the Antichrist.

As you said before, even when you looked at this stuff at first, you were like, “This is kind of weird. I don’t know about this.” How do you deal with readers who are new to you, maybe having the same feeling?

I’m sure there’s some of that when people aren’t familiar at the beginning. There used to be a lot more doubt. Now, I find it’s the opposite. People feel like they understand what’s going on. People are looking for an explanation for why this is happening.

The main message of Silicon Valley is we’re going to take all of your jobs. They’ve done it to themselves. Once we’re at that point, people see it. A lot of what my book focuses on is this prophecy that Thiel embraced a long time ago: that AI and crypto were going to fundamentally restructure the country, and that savvy investors who understood what was coming could reap the benefits.

That’s the core of my book, and I think that matches what a lot of people are seeing as AI and crypto suddenly come out of nowhere to become the biggest monster donors in our political system. The people who are poo-pooing it now are people from the tech right who know it’s all true but are acting like I don’t know what I’m talking about.

That’s part of their PR game. They tried to attack me early on and then suddenly they all went quiet. They got me kicked off of X permanently for no reason, for tweeting about fascism. So I’m not there anymore to make trouble. I think the biggest obstacle so far has been the establishment media that refuses to really discuss these issues. There have been little peaks here and there. The New York Times did an interview with Curtis Yarvin, like seven months after the election. My argument was that people should have known it before.

So it’s left to independent journalists and newsletter writers and others to challenge power because the establishment has a huge moat against challenging billionaire power. If we still had the alt-weeklies, I think the alt-weeklies would have seen this.

What are your feelings about the future of journalism? It sounds like you’re seeing some areas of atrophy but also some areas of growth.

I fear for the future of journalism. I like the newsletter thing. There are good journalists doing newsletters, but there’s a lot of slop out there. There’s also a lot of chasing whatever’s hot right now without any regard for standards, for ethics.

It’s not a panacea. There’s that problem where you have people who can get a big audience but aren’t necessarily doing journalism. They’re just doing sort of attention Olympics. At the same time, I think local newspapers are dying.

It does seem like the billionaires, and that’s part of my book, are seeking to capture as much of the legacy media as they can. Because they want to, basically, kill it. Look what Bari Weiss is doing to CBS. She’s hiring up a bunch of right-wing pundits and chasing out the real journalists. And that’s what they plan to do to CNN.

[The tech oligarchs are] starting their own little media companies now. A16Z, Andreessen Horowitz, has its own little media outlets. OpenAI bought its own little media outlet. I don’t think that stuff will really flourish, but the goal is just to undermine the establishment media’s credibility, buy off the chunks of media you can catch and kill, and then siphon their most devoted followers away from all truth into their own private, corporate-owned and controlled media silos.

Are you at all optimistic or hopeful when it comes to the future of tech?

I think we’re in a phase right now where we need to make people aware of exactly what’s happening and why it’s happening. In my book, I point the finger at these evil oligarchs, but we’re complicit in that. We’re giving them all of our attention and our money. Everywhere you look, it seems like we can’t make a move without somehow paying a billionaire.

We have to rethink how everything has been structured around us. We deserve technology. It’s something we, I think, have a right to. But right now, it’s being controlled by a smaller and smaller group of people who have the worst ideas for the future, who see a dystopian future. It’s all AI and bots and space travel — and people don’t have jobs. I think the national movement against data centers is something that gives me hope.

Further reading from Gil Durán:

• The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (Avid Reader Press, August 18, 2026)

• “Communion: How JD Vance Became an Epstein Class Errand Boy” (The Nerd Reich, June 19, 2026)

• “Palantir Wants To Be The Government” (The Nerd Reich, April 27, 2026)

• “Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Circus Smacked Down in Rome” (The Nerd Reich, March 20, 2026)

• “Where J.D. Vance Gets His Weird, Terrifying Techno-Authoritarian Ideas” (The New Republic, July 22, 2024)

Michael Blanding’s four-year investigation into the family that owns crafting mega chain Hobby Lobby started, as these things do, with the journalist’s curiosity about an altogether different topic.

Blanding was reading a New York Times story about the 2020 “seizure of this rare cuneiform tablet called the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet” from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The tablet was purchased in 2014 for $1.7 million by the Greens, the family that owns Hobby Lobby. The same family that owns the museum and, as Blanding writes in his latest book, is on a mission to collect the antiquities that they believe will prove that the stories of the Bible are historically accurate and true.

“That instantly set my journalistic senses ablaze,” says Blanding.

The author of books on antiquities and artifacts including The Map Thief and In Shakespeare’s Shadow, Blanding was all in. A book idea started forming. But then the story got bigger. Much bigger.

“I don’t take on small topics,” he says.

The story that started with stolen artifacts turned into The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby: a book that weaves the history of the Bible and how it’s been interpreted by different Christian thinkers over the years, with the history of the religious right in America. Also, antiquities trafficking, how the Green family reportedly helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and what tiny picture frames have to do with all the above. (Yes, tiny picture frames.)

The book is a sort of reporting homecoming for Blanding, who is no stranger to digging into a company’s backstory. His first book, The Coke Machine, examined The Coca-Cola Company through what he calls, “the lens of health, environmental, and labor issues.”

In this edition of Depth Perception, Blanding shares what it takes to report a story of this depth and breadth, how he proceeded when the Greens turned down his requests for interviews, and why Hobby Lobby has thrived when other craft retailers have tumbled. The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Jenna Schnuer

OK, let’s start sort of basic. Why the craft industry? How did the Greens start what is now a multi-billion dollar company?

It was something of an accident, to be honest. [Patriarch] David [Green] was working for this proto-Walmart type of department store. He wanted to go into business for himself. They were selling these little miniature picture frames [that were very popular], and [customers] couldn’t get enough of them. He got a couple of partners and he started manufacturing these little picture frames.

He eventually opened a retail store [in 1972] and started carrying other items as well. Ironically, he says, it was the hippies in the 1970s that were buying up beads that really became sort of the cash cow for them.

What he realized, from a business perspective, is that arts and crafts is basically a recession-proof industry. When times are good, people are buying arts and crafts supplies. But when times go bad, they are also buying it because they want to save money and they make gifts instead of purchasing them. So with one exception during the 1980s, when the company ran into trouble, they have just essentially minted money and slowly expanded from one store to five to 20 to 100. And now they have about 1,000 stores around the country. It’s a means to an end. It generates a lot of money for them that they can donate towards these religious causes.

Other craft stores haven’t fared as well in recent years. Is David Green that good of a businessman?

David will tell you that’s all because of the Lord and all because of God’s influence on the company. He runs the company according to biblical principles, and consults God as a silent partner in every decision he makes, whether it’s who to hire or what to sell. One of the things, though, that I do think has been really influential is that they decided very early on, for biblical reasons, that they weren’t going to carry any debt. Michael’s and JOANN [Fabrics] got overleveraged and kind of choked in debt. That was something that Hobby Lobby decided back in the ‘80s not to do, and it’s really served them well.

What was it like to be immersed in fundamentalist Christianity and the story of the Greens for the four years you were working on it?

There were definitely parts of it that were not fun. I didn’t enjoy being immersed so deeply in this Christian nationalist worldview, which I don’t necessarily share personally. I wanted to understand the language and the point of view. I was committed to doing that. But there were definitely a lot of days when I just wanted to take a break.

The antiquities angle of it, however, was really fun for me. I really enjoyed learning about the history of these artifacts, and particularly about the ways that they were trafficked. The Greens worked with this kind of, I’ll call him an “archeologist,” but I put that in quotes. He’s sort of a cross between Indiana Jones and P.T. Barnum.

He was a big talking antiquities dealer who ended up acquiring most of their collection [on their behalf], and it was really fun to follow his travels around the world and see the shady dealers and middlemen that he was getting involved with, and to try to track these items. I actually went to both Egypt and Iraq as part of my research. I got to see a lot of the ancient sites where these artifacts come from. I got to see the pyramids and ancient Babylon, and go to the Baghdad Museum, and try and find some of these more off-the-beaten-track sites that these antiquities were looted from. That’s the kind of reporting I just eat up. I love doing field research.

“May God give us strength.” Inside Haitians’ enduring fight for survival

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0-magnitude earthquake decimated Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The shockwave was so devastating that locals believed it was a force beyond man or nature: It was an act of God.

The quake’s survivors had been warned this day would come: rapture, the second coming of Christ, which would bring about the end of humanity. Fearing the flood that was to follow, they ran to the hills outside the city. But the prophecy never came. Five years later, an estimated — and astounding — 250,000 people would call Canaan, their new makeshift city on a hill, home.

The Long Lead feature An Unnatural Disaster tells how Haitians — penned in by the long, slow collapse of their country’s government and the rise of merciless gangs — have lived for years trapped on the edge of survival. Featuring 13 years of reporting by Jacob Kushner and stunning visuals by Allison Shelly, it explores how these people endured the wrath of nature and the fall of a nation, only to wonder what will happen next. And now, as Haitians lose their temporary protective status in the United States, their plight is as urgent and important as ever.

Learn more about the devastation that 16 years later continues to shake Haiti and its people. Read the Sigma Delta Chi Award-winning feature An Unnatural Disaster today at haiti.longlead.com.

What were some of the most surprising things you learned along the way?

To witness the interaction between the world of these evangelical Christians and the archeological world of these artifacts. The Greens went into this very naively. They had no idea what they were doing. They felt like they were on a mission from God to acquire these artifacts in order to prove something about the truth of the Bible. They dove in with both feet, especially Steve Green, the younger son [of David], and started gobbling up thousands and thousands of these artifacts, cuneiform tablets, papyrus fragments, and things.

I hit pay dirt in my reporting. I was able to speak with some former employees of the museum who were able to share some documents with me and describe the kind of madness behind the scenes. In some cases, a lot of these artifacts were kept in Hobby Lobby warehouses in Oklahoma City, and there was just a thin wall separating pallets full of glitter glue from these illuminated manuscripts. It’s horrific to think about these things in this unprotected scenario. They told me that they were on these shelves that were bulging under the weight of these antique Bibles. They were the same shelves that were being used inside the stores.

There’s this one great anecdote where they supported Marco Rubio for president. He visited to see the collection, and he was standing with a cup of hot coffee over a very precious million-dollar manuscript. One of the curators was just staring but felt like they couldn’t say anything. They sort of gingerly were like, “Would you mind keeping your coffee outside while you do this?”

But the kind of hubris and naivete through which the family just barreled into this world that they really knew nothing about. Of course they got their comeuppance when most of these items were later seized and taken back by the authorities.

It’s a strange thing for them to be such strong business people and then to be so naive in how they spent their money.

I think it comes down to this really fervent belief that God directs all of their actions. When it comes to the company, they truly believe that God is a shareholder and they need to follow “His” precepts. And when it comes to the causes they donate to, they do the same thing.

Mart Green, the older [son of David], for example, was involved in the movie industry and made these religious films. Of course, he grew up Pentecostal. He’d never even been inside a theater before he did this, and yet he somehow felt like, through divine providence, he was meant to do this.

I think Steve [thought] the same thing. Once he was approached with this idea of creating this Bible Museum, he felt like God was opening doors for him, and all he needed to do was step through them and follow God’s teaching.

There’s a passion following their religious views. [But] when things end up blowing up in their face, as they did with the museum, they don’t see that as God’s providence. Steve blamed these other dealers they relied on and said they were taken advantage of and things like that. They [didn’t] say, “Oh well God wanted this to happen.” There’s a real lack of accountability and responsibility that I found really fascinating.

The Greens didn’t speak to you for the book, right?

I decided from the very beginning I was going to do the book whether they talked to me or not. I did reach out to them fairly early on in the process and sent an email through Hobby Lobby. When I didn’t get a response that way, I tried to find the individual personal emails of as many of the family members as I could and was met with absolute silence.

I wasn’t too hopeful that they would speak to me because even though I really did want to be fair and accurately represent their point of view, I think they could see from my past, [I had published] more critical reporting about corporations. But I always felt like there was a chance that maybe they would feel like God would tell them that they should talk to this reporter. I’m not kidding about that.

Did you ever meet any of them?

A year or two into my reporting process, I visited Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. It’s a university that the Green family has invested heavily in and really saved it from bankruptcy in the midst of several scandals. mart Green was actually the chair of the board of trustees of the university for a while.

So I visited the Oral Roberts library because it was one of the few places that had documents relating to the Greens’ church. I was doing research, looking at these documents about this sect, [when] the director of the library comes in and says, “Mart Green is visiting today and he wants to talk to you.”

I thought, “Oh no, he’s seen the emails that [I’ve] sent. He knows that I’m here doing the research.” I was trying as much as possible to take pictures of everything in case he kicked me out of the library. I actually put my recorder in my pocket because Oklahoma is only a one-party consent state, so I wanted to be sure I was going to capture any exchange that we had. He came in, shook my hand, and said, “What are you working on?” It quickly become clear to me that he had no idea who I was. He happened to be in the library, happened to hear there was a researcher there, and was curious about what they were working on.

So I told him, “I’m actually researching your family because I’m writing a book about you.” His face just went completely white. He realized instantly who I was. I asked him, “Have you gotten my emails?” He said, “Yep,” with this kind of Oklahoma drawl. I said, “Do you think you or your family will talk to me?” He shook his head and said, “I don’t think so.” He walked away.

That was my one and only interaction with the Green family.

So how did you get their side of things?

One thing that made me really confident in writing this book was the fact that because the Greens are evangelicals and because it’s so much a part of their identity to spread their beliefs and their mission, they have been very open and public about their story. They’ve written a number of books about the Hobby Lobby Company, about the religion, about the Museum of the Bible. They’ve done countless podcast interviews and newspaper articles. Their words are out there [and I knew I could rely on those sources] to tell it from their perspective.

I didn’t want to just write a critical book about their family. I wanted to have them explain their point of view, so that the reader could really understand it and really make up their own mind about what they thought of it.

Through all of those countless interviews that they did. I was able to both quote them directly in the book, but also create scenes out of their experiences to write the book in [my] narrative style.

After this deep reporting experience, what’s next for you?

One goal I have for my next book is [to find] something that doesn’t take quite the intensity of research that this one and my last couple have. I’d like to be able to write a book that I could maybe complete in a year or two rather than four.

Further reading from Michael Blanding:

• The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby (PublicAffairs, 2026)

• “A vampire panic gripped New England in the 1800s” (Boston Globe Magazine, Oct. 29, 2023)

• In Shakespeare’s Shadow (Grand Central Publishing, 2022)

• The Map Thief (Penguin Publishing, 2015)

• The Coke Machine (Avery, 2011)

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article that went out to subscribers misidentified Mart Green as “Mark.” We apologize for the error.

Julia Angwin has spent her career thinking about threat models. It’s a concept from the security world: You can’t defend against every possible danger, so you figure out which ones are most likely to actually get you, and you plan for those.

For most of her adult life, Angwin’s threat model was corporate surveillance. She led The Wall Street Journal‘s “What They Know” privacy series, wrote a book (Dragnet Nation) about trying to escape the data dragnet, and spent years telling the rest of us to use encrypted messaging. Then she woke up the morning after the 2024 election and said she realized, “I had the wrong threat model.”

What she did next was second nature for her: She started reporting. Angwin, who founded The Markup and then Proof News, and who proved with math what legal scholars had only theorized about racial bias in criminal risk scores, teamed up with policy expert Ami Fields-Meyer and interviewed more than 100 dissidents around the world. First came a New Yorker essay, “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” Now there’s a book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. And after all those conversations, one of the country’s foremost surveillance reporters came away convinced that the thing that actually keeps you safe under authoritarianism is other people.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with Angwin about ditching objectivity for transparency, why journalists shouldn’t bother asking whether they’re allowed to be dissidents, and more. The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Parker Molloy

Can you walk me through your path into journalism, from growing up in Palo Alto to everything since?

I grew up in Palo Alto, which is, to this day, the heart and soul of Silicon Valley. At the time, though, it was more of a Stanford University town. My parents were in tech, but my parents were weird compared to most of the other parents because it was still kind of a hobbyist thing — weird people doing stuff in their garages. But I grew up with multiple computers in the house and I never had a typewriter, which was something most other people had. I learned to program in fifth grade. I went and worked [at] Hewlett-Packard [during] my summers in college. I studied math at the University of Chicago because they didn’t actually have a computer science degree, so that was sort of how you did computer stuff.

But I fell into journalism because the college newspaper needed someone who knew how to use the layout software to lay out the ads. I was good at software, so I got a job there [and was] paid a couple bucks an hour to lay out ads. But hanging around in the newsroom, I just thought, all these people seem like they’re having a lot of fun writing stories. They were eating pizza, they were drinking beer. And so I was like, “I want to do that.” So I started writing stories, and I really fell in love with journalism.

When I graduated college, even though I had a job waiting at Hewlett-Packard, I decided I would do journalism for a little bit and then I would go back to real life. But after I went to D.C. and I was working at a wire service, the dot-com boom happened. All of a sudden, I was a journalist who understood tech and my market value really increased. I got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle covering tech and started my career as a tech reporter.

Did growing up in Silicon Valley make you more suspicious of the tech industry, or did that come later?

When I became a tech reporter … what I noticed was, there was one guy at every newspaper who was the tech reporter. And that guy was almost always a hobbyist. They were somebody who tinkered with tech in their garage and was really into it. And what I felt like was that the coverage was very much like sports coverage, and it was like fan fiction. It was like, “Oh, I really love Apple products,” or “Oh, I’m really into Yahoo versus Google search,” or whatever.

I just didn’t enter it that way. I entered it as: I have fallen in love with journalism and now, because of my skills, I’ve been asked to cover something I know about. But I wasn’t a fangirl, you know? I saw these guys for what they were, which was, a lot of them were just trying to sell you on a bunch of jargon. And I wasn’t falling for it because I knew the jargon, and I knew what computers can do and what they can’t do, and when you’re being sold a bill of goods. I think I entered it from, maybe not even a skeptical standpoint, but a little bit more of an expertise standpoint.

And I will say, one of the critiques I have of journalism is it’s not been a profession of expertise. This is changing now, but when I started as a journalist, the idea was you’re a general expert and you should be able to cover everything. And you should also write it at a fourth grade level, so it should be really dumbed down. And I think that harmed the sophistication of the coverage. You could definitely see it in the dot-com boom coverage, where people just fell for everything. And I think I was always one of the more skeptical reporters, only because I was seeing it clearly.

You wrote an essay for The New Yorker, published in April 2025, called “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” That was a bit outside your regular beat. Can you tell me a bit about how that came about, and how the idea later became a book?

I woke up after the 2024 presidential election with a lot of feelings and the most prominent [one] was that I had the wrong threat model.

I have spent a lot of my life reporting on and trying to mitigate the threats of the corporate big data collection that we all are subject to. So that means using encrypted messaging and trying to choose products that are more privacy-protecting, even if they’re sometimes a little bit more annoying. And that morning after the election, I just thought to myself, “You know, I need to think a lot more about authoritarian threats than I have been thinking about, and I want to understand what that looks like.”

I called up my friend Ami, who I knew [from reporting on] tech policy, because he worked on tech policy in the White House. He was at the Ash Center at Harvard, and that is a place where a lot of dissidents from authoritarian regimes go when they’re basically exiled from their country, and they do a fellowship there while they write a book, or they figure out what they’re going to do next. And so I was like, “Ami, can we interview some of the dissidents? Let’s get on the phone with them.” So we started doing Zoom interviews with them. And at first, I honestly wasn’t sure where we were going with it, but we ended up with this New Yorker piece that was called “So You Want to Be a Dissident,” and it was literally just like, “Hey, America, here’s how it works. Here’s what the dissident situation is.”

But after that piece ran, a bunch of book publishers came to us and asked if we could do this as a book and do it fast. And so Ami and I were like, “OK, yeah, we’re kind of game for this.” So we dove into it, we wrote it really fast. I think we got the book deal in June and we filed the manuscript in December. We interviewed more than 100 dissidents around the world and extracted the lessons from them. And so interestingly, all these themes were resonant in all sorts of different environments. They all spoke similarly about their experiences.

Fighting an imperial ghost that respects no boundaries

“We have an old rule,” Vladimir Putin declared in 2025. “Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is ours.” This decree was not just about land, as his country’s neighbors have learned. The Russian president also seeks to recast history, identity, and language across Eastern Europe and Southwest Asia.

For the Long Lead photo-first feature, Border Line War, prolific conflict photographer Thomas Dworzak traveled thousands of miles to document the multi-country resistance to Russia’s imperial aims. To chronicle the impact of Putin’s war in Ukraine away from the battlefront, the Magnum Photos member began exploring the Russian border — from Norway to Kazakhstan — in 2023. Across a blast zone that extends thousands of miles, his camera captured protests, performances, museums, and military trainings, all gripped by the ghost of an empire that insists it has no boundaries.

Accompanied by expert analysis from foreign affairs columnist and former Moscow bureau chief Christian Caryl, this visual essay shows how countries from the Arctic, through the Baltics, and down into the heart of Asia have held the line with the menace next door — and what it’s like when the cold wind of war blows through this new Iron Curtain.

Read Border Line War today, and to learn about Long Lead’s work, subscribe to the Long Lead Newsletter here.

After having spent more time reporting for the book, do you look back at the essay and disagree with anything that you wrote?

I would say the thing that my thinking evolved the most on was the question of how you protect yourself. We had a little bit in the New Yorker piece on ways to keep yourself safe, because that was my animating first question. I think I really hoped I was going to learn that there’s a certain codebook and spycraft and techniques that you could use, and I was still a little bit in the throes of that in the New Yorker piece, so [that essay] is a little bit more prescriptive on [the] kinds of ways you can protect yourself.

And by the time I was done reporting the book, I really felt like the real protection is your community. It was, you know, a very woo-woo kind of outcome, but it really was what people told us. You have to do the best you can. You shouldn’t do stupid things, you should use encryption, and you should have discipline around some of your messaging practices and certain things you don’t write down, et cetera. But in the end, what really protects you is the fact that there’s a bunch of people who care about you and will advocate for you when something bad happens. And so we spend a lot of time in the book talking about how to build that community.

Of the 100-plus people you interviewed, was there advice you heard repeatedly that crossed cultural and geographic boundaries?

We found a real... we call it a taxonomy of dissent. We basically identified 16 different lessons that we learned from them all, and they were mostly consistent. I guess I would put them in four big buckets.

Bucket number one is: almost everybody described this feeling of not having a choice. You would say to someone, “Why did you choose to become a dissident?” And they would say, “I didn’t choose. I was called to it because I couldn’t stand by and watch this thing happening,” or “I couldn’t be complicit in this thing happening.” And they all describe sort of this breaking point that we call a moral collision, where the thing that they were doing was because they couldn’t live with themselves. But it was interesting because they were aware of the risks. They were like, “I knew I was going to lose my job,” or “I knew I was going to risk my physical safety.” There was a more existential risk, which was, “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.” And so it was so interesting to me that none of them wanted to be called courageous. None of them wanted to be called a dissident. They were just like, “I did what I had to do.”

Another lesson was they all found other people. This is not work you can do alone. You have to find a political home. You have to build community with people who share your values.

The other thing that they all talked about was this whole section of the book we call, basically, “Don’t be stupid.” Don’t post all your stuff on social media, don’t cheat on your taxes, don’t speed in your car. Don’t give the regime easy ways to get you.

And then the final part of the book is about growing the movement, coalition building, which is the idea that if a movement is going to be successful, it’s always a numbers game. You’re going to end up in coalition with people you don’t like or that make you uncomfortable. And so we talk a lot about that discomfort, how to live with that discomfort, and how to find shared values within those kinds of coalitions.

You talked about how community is essentially the core of this, how a lot of staying safe comes back to community. And you spent a lot of time as the country’s foremost surveillance reporter. How did the privacy reporter conclude that technology isn’t the answer to staying safe?

I know, it hurt my soul, just to be really clear with you. It was a real disappointment. Ten years ago, I wrote a book on how to try to protect yourself against surveillance called Dragnet Nation. And in it, I go through all the steps I try to do to protect myself and my data. The ultimate conclusion of the book was that individual action wasn’t enough. In that case, I was basically hoping we would do things like pass a comprehensive privacy law, things that we have failed to do in past 10 years. I was hoping that we would understand this as a collective problem, but I was thinking of legislation, which is how we should, in a proper democracy, do collective action.

But we’re 10 years later, and everything that I wrote in that book as the most dire scenario, it is worse. My predictions were under-paranoid and my solutions feel a little half-assed because we can’t really count on the government to do this for us. This isn’t going to be a legislative solution. So when we talk about, “How do we collectively protect ourselves,” we do end up with the idea that... We have a whole chapter on this woman where what saved her is her neighbors, who told her there was a stalker outside. That is the level we’re at.

And I will say, doing the reporting for this book, I got a little radicalized myself. I realized I didn’t know my neighbors. I put flyers on every house on the block, held a little party for everybody, and started a neighborhood group chat, because I realized I needed to do this. I hadn’t been building community in my neighborhood. My husband, by the way, is Mr. Chatty, and he’s like, “Oh, so you’ve discovered community? I’ve been doing this my whole life.”

Can a working journalist be a dissident? Should they be? Where’s the line for a reporter at an outlet whose owners settled with the president, for example?

I think that, first of all, it’s important to understand the way authoritarianism works these days. Authoritarianism is on the rise around the world. Three-quarters of the world lives under some sort of autocracy, and the U.S. is sliding in that direction. We just lost our status as a liberal democracy this year, according to the V-Dem Institute that tracks this stuff.

But a lot of the authoritarian regimes still hold elections. They masquerade as democracies. Putin has elections, right? What they do is they hollow out democratic institutions, and they have a regime that is basically corrupt and lawless. And yet it’s built on this web of lies: that we’re a democracy. And that, “All those little things you’re noticing going on? Those are just legal niceties you don’t need to worry about. Don’t worry your pretty little head. And the wars we’re fighting? We’re winning. And you think your prices are going up, but they’re going down.”

This is how authoritarianism has always operated. And Václav Havel, who led the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, overthrowing the communist regime peacefully, wrote so powerfully about this. Lies are how these regimes are built, and telling the truth is actually the piercing of that veil, and that’s why it’s so dangerous. And so when I saw my profession, journalism, in that light, I understood that we were already dissidents. This thing we ask ourselves, “Should we or shouldn’t we?” No, we already are. If we’re in the business of telling the truth, we are in that. We’ve already crossed that line.

It’s also important to realize that in almost every authoritarian regime, the first thing they try to do is capture the media, and they usually succeed. They capture the corporate media because big institutions, whether they’re media or not, are amoral. Especially in capitalism, they’re profit-seeking enterprises. They are not designed for morality, and so they will align with power if no other force holds them to account. So it’s not unusual that big media is captured almost immediately in an authoritarian regime.

What has always been the bulwark of resistance is independent media. And I particularly love the moment we’re in right now in the U.S., where there’s so much reader-supported media, because that is the most robust source of funding. They can’t take away all your $10 donations. I mean, they would have to round up all those people and steal their $10 from them. It’d just be a lot of work. So I really feel like independent media is the thing that we have to remember is so important at this moment. We have to defend it and advocate for it.

What is the best journalistic career advice you ever received?

So I’m going to do two. The first one wasn’t really journalistic career advice, but in high school, I think it was in ninth grade, we had to write an essay about, I don’t know, World War I, and I don’t remember what the exact topic was, but I wrote something that was basically along the lines of: these people sucked, but humans just suck, and this war sucked. Which, fair enough. But my teacher said, “Stay after class,” and he said to me: “You’re not wrong. You’re obviously smart. But cynicism is the easy path. It’s harder to be hopeful, and I challenge you to live your life that way.”

And I gotta say, that really stuck with me. And I think journalism, in a way, is endless hope, because what you’re doing is you keep hoping that your story is going to change the world. And sometimes it does, most of the time it doesn’t, but you still believe the truth is going to set people free, right? And so you have to constantly tap into that well of hope to do journalism.

My most actionable advice in journalism was when I joined The Wall Street Journal. There was this woman who was my mentor, Rebecca Blumenstein. She’s the head of NBC News. And I was like, “Rebecca, what do I need to know?” And I’m waiting for some really profound things. She’s like, “It’s all about beverage management.” And I was like, “Beverage management?” She was like, “Yeah. You have got to caffeinate right up to the right amount, but you can’t get too much or you can’t work. And then you’ve got to drink your alcohol with your sources, but you can’t have too much because you’ll forget what they told you.” And I was like, “Oh my god, she’s so right.”

Any bad advice you want to share?

I guess I would just use that prompt as an opportunity to rail against the fiction of objectivity, which I believe is a failed concept that has failed journalism and that we should abandon. It relies on this absurd premise that if your heart is pure somehow, and you don’t have views, then your reporting is pure. And I think it’s really important that we get rid of that. No one’s heart is pure. What’s important is: Is your reporting transparent? Is it replicable? Can somebody see why you are making the claim you’re making, and then say, “OK, I see how they got there, and that is something I’m willing to believe.” That’s why at my news outlet, Proof News, we have an ingredients label.

Literally: What sources did we use? What are the things that we’re concluding from those sources? And what are our remaining doubts? There’s always things you still don’t know. And I think transparency is so much more important than objectivity, and I would just like all journalists to make that pivot.

Finally, after 100 conversations with people who’ve lived under regimes worse than ours, what makes you hopeful for the future of journalism, and the world?

I think we’re doing a lot of things right here. I didn’t think the United States was going to be ready to fight back against authoritarianism. I felt, like a lot of people did, that we’re too wealthy, we’re too lazy, we’re too compliant. But I have been so impressed by the resistance that I’ve seen here. And it’s been, most importantly, non-violent. Non-violent resistance is twice as effective as violent resistance. And it’s really important, because when you have any violence on the side of the movement, the regime uses that to discredit the whole movement. And so I’ve been really impressed that in the U.S., we’ve had a lot of discipline.

And people are fighting not just in protest. They’re refusing to comply. The judges are refusing to comply with lawless orders. Universities are refusing to comply with coercion from the state. Even Congress, which barely exists, refused to comply with the [January 6 Anti-Weaponization Fund] slush fund. It’s important to make every bit of lawlessness and corruption hard for them to pull off, to hold the line at every front. And we’re doing that; we’re doing it well. We just need to take it up. You know, amp it to 11.

Further reading from Julia Angwin:

• On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, with Ami Fields-Meyer (Mariner Books, June 2026)

• “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” with Ami Fields-Meyer (The New Yorker, April 12, 2025)

• “Seeking Reliable Election Information? Don’t Trust AI,” with Alondra Nelson and Rina Palta (Proof News, Feb. 27, 2024)

• “Machine Bias” (ProPublica, May 23, 2016)

• Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014)

Long before the Afghan journalist and media founder Zahra Joya was named one of TIME’s Women of the Year, before she became a primary target of the Taliban during its second takeover of Kabul in 2021, and before she was among the precious few female journalists documenting the persecution of ethnic Hazaras in Afghanistan, Joya went by another name entirely: Mohammad.

It was a decision she made out of survival at just eight years old, during the Taliban’s first reign over Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. To get an education, she went by the new alias, dressed in boys’ clothing, and walked two hours to school — there and back — all to claim a right that had been denied to girls across the country.

“I completely changed my identity, actually,” she tells me. “It was a potential risk for myself, for my family, and even for my neighbors, but I did it anyway.”

It was this education that would ultimately embolden Joya to become one of Afghanistan’s leading voices on the lives of women and girls under Taliban rule. In November 2020, she founded Rukhshana Media, which has since earned international recognition for its investigations into gender persecution and human rights abuses, something Joya herself argues should be criminalized by the International Criminal Court under “gender apartheid.”

Less than a year after the founding of the women-led newsroom, the Taliban swept back into power following the rapid withdrawal of Western troops in Afghanistan in August 2021. But instead of going dark, Rukhshana Media pressed on. Joya briefly went into hiding and eventually found refuge in the United Kingdom, where she remains in exile. Now, nearly five years to the day that the Taliban once again transformed the course of Afghanistan’s history, Joya is reclaiming that history in her own words through a new memoir, The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, written in partnership with the journalist and Joya’s longtime friend Amie Ferris-Rotman.

In this edition of Depth Perception, Joya makes another courageous case for why the world cannot — must not — turn away from the plight of women and girls. In turning the spotlight onto her own story, Joya hopes to show that surmounting the challenges to gender equality in Afghanistan would finally help strengthen the broader fight for women’s rights everywhere. —Kelly Kimball

What first drew you to write The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, and what are you hoping to convey with the book?

When I wanted to write this book with Amie Ferris-Rotman, a longtime journalist and friend, the idea began years ago, in 2021, after I arrived in the UK. It took a lot of time for the idea to finally become a book and appear on the page.

This is a story about Afghan history. It is about women and it is about the struggle and the hope that my generation and the entire people of Afghanistan had, and are still fighting for, in this country. We really don’t know when it will end. We really don’t know when we will see real change in our lives and in our country.

So that was the main purpose of the book, and I hope people can understand and read it and somehow help us to build this country in a proper way — without their own interests. We, the people of Afghanistan, can solve this problem, which is a very long and historical one.

Were there any specific moments in the book that you found difficult to revisit? Are there moments that readers might not expect you to write about?

I think this book was written in a very profound, challenging time, at a time when I was navigating a lot of depression, stress, anxiety, and hope, all at once. Yes, there are many issues that were difficult for me to talk about in public, obviously. I always feel that it is quite ambitious, and also I’m a bit nervous because I have put my life up for judgment in front of people.

There were lots of issues that I really wanted to keep safe for myself, but I thought, “No, it’s the time.” It’s difficult to be silent. Silence is not the solution.

One of the topics that was difficult for me to recount was the investigative journalism that I have done during the past five years, particularly when I wanted to reflect back on the notes and the calls that I had with women, particularly women who had been arrested by the Taliban and were sexually assaulted by Taliban soldiers in prison. That was quite a heavy experience, and heavy for me to write about.

Also the whole chapter on gender apartheid in Afghanistan. Obviously, it was also my childhood story.… I grew up during the first rule of the Taliban, when being a girl meant being denied the most basic rights. So, with that purpose of showing how difficult it is to be a woman in a country like Afghanistan, I tried to be more honest and bring the most accurate and real stories that I was living and experiencing.

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

On February 24, 2022 Russia invaded 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.

You made a lot of sacrifices to give yourself an education. You had to fight for your rights back then. What is the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan now? Are the stakes even higher? Is it basically the same?

Unfortunately, in Afghanistan, we are seeing that history is repeating itself many times. It’s repeating with every regime change. So yes, I sacrificed a lot for my very basic human rights and my existence as a woman in Afghanistan during the first rule of the Taliban. When the first rule of the Taliban finished, I thought, “Thank God, it’s over.”

Then we started to take the opportunity that we had after 2001 and after the fall of the Taliban. We thought this was the time for us to work for this country, to build this country, and we wanted to bring real change. But obviously it didn’t happen. I mean, after 20 years, we are back at the stage where we were before.

I think, for me, I was one of the luckiest girls in my village in Bamyan. I had the chance and I had a supportive family. They supported my dreams and they gave me the opportunity to go to school. But when I’m thinking about millions of other girls, they are struggling with poverty. They are struggling with so many restrictions and the gender apartheid system the Taliban created. Also, millions of women are struggling with poverty, with deprivation.

So I couldn’t see any difference between the second rule of the Taliban compared to the first rule. They are the same because the Taliban are the same people. They have the same ideology. They have the same policy toward women and toward the education system.

In Afghanistan, unfortunately, as much as Afghan women have access to technology, the Taliban have the same access. They are using technology as a tool to spread fear, spread their ideology, and enforce the many restrictions that they have. Also, through technology, even the Taliban have followers in many countries. We have seen that after five years, Russia is one of the first countries in the world to recognize the Taliban regime as a legitimate government.

[Earlier this month], there were a lot of arguments and discussions about why Taliban delegations were able to come to Europe and have these conversations, and it is all concerning, honestly.

You founded Rukhshana Media during the U.S. occupation and were able to grow it into a successful, internationally recognized newsroom. I’m wondering if you can take us back to the Taliban’s second takeover and how you have been able to maintain coverage of women and girls in such a consistent way since then, while also maintaining the safety of your reporters.

Rukhshana Media is a platform for women and girls to amplify their voices. They have been forced into silence and there are so many barriers preventing them from raising their voices and asking for their human rights.

Yes, it is a very challenging task that I am working on, and there are a lot of problems. For example, one of the things that happened after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban is that independent media and independent journalism has died. It’s gone. The Taliban have imposed so many restrictions. They are controlling the media operating inside the country and they have red lines.

So what we are doing at Rukhshana Media is crossing those red lines set by the Taliban, which is dangerous. It is a very risky task. I am really grateful to my brave colleagues, most of whom are female journalists. They are still resisting. They are still using their bravery to gather information and to ensure the world does not forget us.

And also, yes, I know that I am outside Afghanistan. I have been miles away from my country, but mentally I am inside Afghanistan. I am with the women.

I think one of Rukhshana Media‘s messages — running in exile despite the many challenges that we are facing — is that we are not giving up. We are not letting this extremist group take our rights away. We are citizens of this world. We are human beings. So that’s our fight. It’s a consistent fight for me and for my colleagues at Rukhshana Media.

Being based in London, you’re in one of the media capitals of the world. I’m sure you have seen how coverage of Afghanistan — and coverage of women and girls’ rights in Afghanistan — has declined. I’m wondering if you feel like the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan are getting the attention they deserve. And if not, why do you believe their stories haven’t gotten the same attention as before?

You’re a journalist yourself, and you know how difficult it is now to bring the issue of Afghanistan, particularly women’s issues in that country, to the center of attention in the wider community.

After the fall of Kabul, so many things happened around the world: the wars in the Middle East, Gaza, and Ukraine, and so many others in Somalia, South Sudan, and elsewhere. But Afghanistan is still in a very serious human rights crisis. I feel like if we don’t pay attention to Afghanistan’s problems, and if we don’t see any willingness to help solve them, then by ignoring the situation, Afghanistan will get worse and the problem will not be solved.

So, for me, as a journalist, as the editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media, and as a woman from Afghanistan, it’s really important to amplify the voices of people, even though there is no ear to listen to us. It is important for us to keep telling these stories to the world and warning people that this is a serious crisis. If you don’t take it seriously, I think it will become a bigger problem for the world, for the entire international community, and for the region beyond Afghanistan’s borders. But obviously it is tough. I mean, when you see that nobody is listening to you and you’re telling these stories repeatedly, obviously it’s heartbreaking. But there is no choice. You really don’t have a choice.

I’m still thankful to some of the people who still care about Afghanistan. For example, at Rukhshana Media, we have a very good collaboration with some other media outlets, particularly The Guardian. Hopefully one day people can realize that by ignoring Afghanistan, they will not solve the problem.

As a journalist and founder, you oversee breaking news and other types of journalistic storytelling. What was the experience like writing a book? A book is much more demanding. It’s much longer. Did writing this book give you the opportunity to more closely examine stories that did not make it into your articles?

Yes, I have worked as a journalist [for] more than a decade, and with this book in particular, I worked with my friend. It was a collaborative project and also the Little Brown team [was] behind us.

It’s completely different from what you are doing for an article. Obviously, you have to do fact-checking, you have to do verification, but in a book, when you talk about a specific topic, you have to bring more detail.

Also, in the world we are living in, people are so busy. People basically don’t have that much time for reading a book these days. I think it’s very important for a writer to keep the readers’ interests in mind when you are writing and presenting the information. For The Vanishing Girl of Kabul, it was a unique experience and I learned a lot. I’m really determined to continue this process if I can, hopefully.

This book is serving as a testament to the history of Afghan women. Most of the time, Afghan women have never had the chance to write their own history. Others told our stories and others narrated our stories. So this was, I think, a wonderful opportunity for me.

You argue in your book that the battle for equality is on every continent. What do you mean by this?

Unfortunately, Afghanistan is a home for men most of the time and there is not always a sense of belonging for its daughters. That’s why, if you see the last page of my book, I finish the book with hope for my niece. She is six years old, she is in the UK, and she has a lot of opportunities. But at the same time, she does not yet know where she actually came from.

Afghanistan has never given the sense that it belongs to its daughters or that it belongs to its women. That’s why it makes me stronger. It gives me more hope, and it gives me the strength to continue my work despite the many challenges that we are facing.

I hope that by writing, by sharing these stories, and by having conversations and talking, we can make a difference. That’s why I really hope that this country will one day belong to its daughters too.

Further reading from Zahra Joya:

• “Afghan Women Must Not Be Silenced” (Amnesty International, Nov. 25, 2025)

• “Taliban ‘Legitimising Child Marriage’ With New Law, Activists Warn” (Rukhshana Media, May 25, 2026)

• “‘A Few Beatings Won’t Kill you’: Judge Rejects Divorce Request of Woman Abused by Husband in Afghanistan” (The Guardian, March 12, 2026)

• “Taliban Launch Crackdown on Afghanistan’s Secret Beauty Salons” (The Guardian, Aug. 30, 2025)

• “Misleading Narratives: What is the Situation of Women in Afghanistan Under Taliban Rule?” (Rukhshana Media, May 29, 2025)

• “‘I Thought About the Efforts and Struggles of Two Decades… and Cried’” (Committee to Protect Journalists, Aug. 11, 2022)

Nicholas Carr’s book, Superbloom, opens on a scene of social media influencers literally running amok. It’s the spring of 2019, and the poppies of Walker Canyon, 70 miles southwest of Los Angeles, are bursting with color. YouTubers, TikTokers, and Instagrammers storm the sensitive naturescape to capture the moment. They snap selfies, crush the flowers, and ultimately incite online outrage.

The scene is both a portrait of and a metaphor for the generations of people who’ve been handed powerful communication tools that have somehow made us ever more disconnected from each other and reality. “We live today in a perpetual superbloom — not of flowers but of messages,” Carr writes. “We spend our days sharing information, connected as never before, but the more we communicate, the worse things seem to get.”

Carr’s sixth book, Superbloom, is out in paperback this month. As with many works exploring the impacts of the internet — like his newsletter New Cartographies — it’s about a wild array of topics. (Index entries include, for instance: Carlin, George; ChatGPT; and cults of personality.) But its unifying theme is how communication technologies have shaped the world and people’s perception of it. And as the machines have begun to take over, the changes we’ve endured haven’t been for the better.

Superbloom pairs perfectly with The Shallows, Carr’s New York Times bestseller (published in 2010 and updated in 2020) about the cognitive and behavioral effects of the web. In this edition of Depth Perception, we speak with the Pulitzer Prize-finalist about the consolidation of media, the politicalization of tech leaders, and the future of journalism in the age of the algorithm. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. —John Patrick Pullen

Superbloom is fantastic, but let’s start with The Shallows, which pardon the pun, made some big waves. That book stemmed from an Atlantic cover story by you, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” about 20 years ago. So the question is: How dumb are we now?

One of the drawbacks of being a prophet of doom is that if you are proven correct, you can’t take any pleasure from it. The trends that I described in The Shallows and “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” have unfortunately accelerated. If anything, we’re more distracted, less able to control our own thoughts, to control our own attention. So sadly, I think my diagnosis has panned out.

Of course, this month’s Atlantic cover story is Rose Horowitch’s “The End of Reading is Here.” And here we are, an author and an editor. Are we whistling past the graveyard or tourists at the apocalypse?

Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1450. For the next 500 years, I think the printed page, and in particular the book, was kind of the center of culture. At the beginning of this century, it’s almost been a clean break. We shifted away from the printed page into the computer screen. I think that does fundamentally change the way we read, the way we communicate.

To say that reading itself is going away is probably an exaggeration. But I think literary reading, or what some call deep reading, where you are focused on a long text, word by word, line by line, page by page, is becoming rarer and rarer. I think it is a reflection of the change in media technology.

You write in Superbloom about the chorus of remorse by tech leaders in 2016 who acknowledged they were “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology,” as Facebook’s first president Sean Parker said. But they did it anyway. Yet you don’t lay the blame solely at their feet: The way we use this tech is human nature, and people have deceived themselves into thinking it can be fixed, you argue.

Many of those tech leaders stood next to Trump when he was re-inaugurated last January. Superbloom was published in hardcover one week later. Does the way tech has capitulated to and cozied up to political power in this term change your analysis?

Not really. I think what it’s shown is that those expressions of remorse are pretty superficial. There was a lot of social concern about the problems social media and smartphones had caused, particularly with young people, and [tech leaders] were taking the blame. So they kind of capitulated and started expressing remorse because that’s what they felt called upon to do.

But I think what we’ve seen in the last year or so is not so much that they’re cozying up to power or sycophantically putting themselves at the feet of Trump — though there is some of that — but it’s that they’ve realized that they can gain political power. I think until recently, the tech industry didn’t really care about politics that much. In fact, I think they kind of felt it was beneath them to dabble in this old, outdated way of running things.

Over the last five [to] 10 years, the political climate has changed and has gone against technology [and] against Silicon Valley. We saw that in the first Trump administration, but I think we saw even more in the Biden administration, where you saw efforts from both the right and the left to think about regulating the industry, to call industry leaders like Mark Zuckerberg up before Congress to testify in very antagonistic ways, and a refocus on antitrust regulation or enforcement. Suddenly they no longer had the political establishment on their side. I think what they saw with Trump in the second campaign is an opportunity to influence him, to influence his administration — an opportunity to use the changes in American politics to gain political power for themselves. They realized that this was important to their business. They realized that they like power and so they went for it.

More from Depth Perception

For me, the most impactful part of Superbloom came early on, when you outlined how the physical technology of making music records influenced albums’ content. We wouldn’t have art like John Coultrane’s “A Love Supreme” without what you smartly recognized as “what Mark Zuckerberg disdainfully calls friction on the processes of information production.” In a world of generative AI and short-form content, where it’s becoming ever-easier to create but increasingly harder to fit deep meaning into the message, what are we gaining and what have we lost?

When we look back at what I’ll call analog media, pre-digital media, we tend to see a big mess. You didn’t have a phone that could do everything. Our phones now have all information of all sorts, whether it’s entertainment or news or whatever, digitized. It can be fed through a single device. You look back into the ‘70s, ‘80s, even the early ‘90s, and you had separate devices for all of these things. You had to have a record player or turntable, a radio and a television, a physical photo album and an old school telephone — and it seems like, “Oh my gosh, that was so horrible.”

But what I argue is that it actually gave us a sense of differentiation among different forms of information, even different experiences. You had to make choices: Do I want to spend time with a newspaper now and read, or do I want to put a record on the turntable and listen to music, or do I want to write a letter to someone?

Specialized devices and specialized networks actually gave coherence to our use of media… and required us to impose a kind of set of choices of our own on how we spend our time. Built into this analog media ecosystem were distinctions between what’s important and what’s trivial, what’s fact, what’s fiction, what’s entertainment, what kind of things are of pressing importance. And I think that helped us navigate a time when we were already being inundated by lots of information.

It also meant that artists, musicians, and writers had lots of different established forms that they could work in. You mentioned the record album. An LP record is, in one way, determined by physics, how you know how much music you could fit on a piece of vinyl … When we had the arrival of it, suddenly musicians had this new form that they could express themselves through. So it was no longer just a 45 RPM single song record — it expanded their horizons — and in what looks like constraint, actually was enormously freeing.

Looking back, we can see certain advantages to having this messy, highly specialized media landscape. Now everything comes through the same device and everything competes with each other in the same way. You have to keep everything short. You have to grab people’s attention because everything is pulling at you at the same time. And I think we’ve lost a lot of formal differentiation in communications, art, and entertainment. We’ve also lost the ability to control our own consumption of all that stuff. We’re constantly looking at what our phone tells us to look at, rather than making moment-by-moment decisions about how we’re going to spend our time.

There, at the end, you’re talking about consuming the content that’s served to you. I always make the argument that the world needs more editors, but it seems as though algorithmic curation is just off the rails at this point — it’s run amok. In the book, you talk a lot about the news feed. Is that where we went wrong? Was it the feed that broke us?

The feed fundamentally changed our relationship to information and media of all sorts. Suddenly, machine technology began to take over the editorial function. It was no longer a person, an editor, or a producer deciding what would be sent to the audience. That was always a flawed process, but it was a person, many of whom actually cared about quality, veracity, and things like that.

Then human beings began to be replaced by an automated algorithm, and the algorithm doesn’t really care about quality or veracity or anything else. It cares about reading signals that tell it what’s going to gain some immediate hold on a person’s attention. It doesn’t have to be a long hold — it can be a very temporary one before it serves up the next thing. It also removed from us control over our choice of what we were going to look at or listen to. That choice went to the machine, and to the corporation behind the machine.

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” That’s a Mark Zuckerberg quote from your book that you call “grotesque not because it’s false — it’s altogether true.” You cite it because it’s the essence of what you call “content collapse.” This interview will be competing for attention in the feed against the war in Iran, National Hammock Day, and who knows what else. Can longform journalism survive content collapse?

Content collapse is what I was getting at earlier, where everything is served up through the same device, in competition with everything else, and mediated through algorithms. So everything tends to get shorter and gain a briefer purchase on a person’s attention.

One of the things we need to recognize about internet, social media, and AI companies now is that it goes against their interests for us to be deeply immersed in reading a longform article, or even watching a long movie, because they make their money by us changing our focus — it gives them new opportunity to show us ads and gain information about what triggers our behavior. Their algorithms are fundamentally opposed to any longform, anything that’s going to gain a long, extended purchase on our attention. We’re fighting that.

I don’t think longform writing will disappear — there are still going to be plenty of books and longer articles. But I think the audience for that is going to be smaller and smaller, and even the people capable of producing it, is probably going to shrink as well.

You’re a writer — this is your sixth book. The adage is “write what you know.” But if you knew how to write differently, what other way would you publish this information that would make it more relevant? Should Superbloom be a podcast or a Netflix series?

I think in terms of books, so for me, it was always a book. I did sense that it had a kind of episodic quality and moved through history while still having a common theme that might have lent itself to a documentary or a nonfiction TV series. Nobody’s offered to do that, so it’s probably not going to happen. But that’s more me seeing another opportunity there than me trying to think of a better way to reach an audience. So for better or for worse, I think I am still stuck in the literary culture.

Last question: When some AI company inevitably strips this interview of all its important points, what one thing do you think readers will lose most by not having read it?

If you interact with AI summaries of original things or AI replications of them, you begin to believe that they’re not worth your time, and you begin to lose even the ability to fully engage with the originals. And so, you become more and more dependent on the AI summaries or the AI slop as a substitute for the real thing, and less able to really grapple with or enjoy the real thing.

The danger here is that this does become a self-reinforcing cycle where the AI summary or the AI replication of the original begins to simply overwhelm the original itself. And once that happens, then you’ve got a real cultural problem because you’re starting to remove the incentives, not only for reading and viewing serious works of writing and music, but you are removing the incentives for producing them as well.

What’s one app, tool, or service that you can’t do your work without?

Probably the most important is the local library systems app or website for searching their collections. Because I’m not an academic, I don’t have access to an academic library, but I do a lot of research. And so what’s been a real boon to me is the fact that local libraries have joined into big consortiums that often include academic libraries, and you can search their collections and the broader collection. Pretty much any imaginable book or article I can find online through library websites.

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

The way that you should avoid anecdotes and instead concentrate on hard evidence, surveys, experiments — I think that’s really wrongheaded. I think anecdotes, which are actually just people’s experiences, you can learn a lot more about even a very scientific or technological phenomenon by actually talking to people about the way they use an app or a tool, or the way they think.

What makes you think journalism is doomed?

Writing to the algorithm is going to erode the ability of journalism to really do its job, because you’re not even really writing for the audience. You’re writing for a machine that is between you and the audience. This narrows the range of what’s covered. It forces journalists to fit their work to a kind of inhuman editor that is very powerful. The mechanization of the editorial function, the content selection function, is very dangerous. At the same time, given the power that these algorithms have come to hold in getting between journalists or creators and the audience, it’s very hard to see how you escape the dynamic that we’re in currently.

What makes you feel hopeful for the future of journalism?

People. The good thing is that people are still curious if you give them an opportunity. I find it hard to imagine human curiosity going away. If we can sustain human curiosity, then there’s still hope.

Further reading from Nicholas Carr:

• “Operation Gaslight” (The New Atlantis, April 16, 2026)

• Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, (W.W. Norton & Company, Jan. 28, 2025)

• The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, (W.W. Norton & Company, March 03, 2020)

• “Why Trump Tweets (And Why We Listen)” (Politico Magazine, January 26, 2018)

• “How Social Media Is Ruining Politics” (Politico Magazine, September 2, 2015)

• “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (The Atlantic, July 2008)

Jacob Silverman started covering the tech industry a few years after the 2008 financial crisis. In the nearly two decades since, he’s held a front-row seat to what he considers to be one of the most important stories out there.

Take Elon Musk, who has far and away become the richest person in history, while simultaneously becoming more politically active and extreme. He’s not alone. Silverman’s reporting follows many tech elites who have aligned themselves with the right and the Trump administration as they gain status in Silicon Valley.

“What I keep finding, especially with Musk and his peers, is this kind of paranoid removal from society and common experience that they seem to embody,” Silverman says, adding this is a toxic relationship that is having profound impacts on our society.

At the center of Silverman’s reporting focus, he’s published multiple notable books on the tech industry, including his most recent: a critical book on Elon Musk titled Gilded Rage.

In this edition of Depth Perception, we ask Silverman how he got into journalism, what stories he thinks are most important to cover and where independent journalism is heading. —Thor Benson

What got you into journalism, and how has the arc of your career looked?

Well, it’s definitely not an arc. It’s sort of a jagged path that I’ve accidentally followed somehow. I’m 41. I graduated from college in 2006, and I did not really intend to go into journalism.

I was a humanities and English guy. I liked writing, but I did not study journalism. I would say the main thing that sent me on this path was the 2008 recession. I had some jobs after college — nothing that I really liked that much — and also traveled some. When I came back, the economy was crashing.

I started doing things like book reviews and a little bit of cultural reporting, [which] was one of the few things that felt available to me in between applying for all kinds of service and manual labor jobs. Now, it took me a long time to really think of myself as a journalist. I just sort of thought I was a writer who was doing freelance journalism work ... And then it was in about 2012 that I started writing more about tech and started doing actual reporting.

What made you decide to start focusing on some of these big issues that you’re looking at, from crypto to Elon Musk?

I think I have this allergy to hype and fads and whatever is sort of promoted at the moment, especially promoted by the forces of consumerism or by powerful people. That’s, I think, what I’ve responded to a lot as a tech journalist over the last 14 years or so, which is that I’ve just taken a look at what’s ascendant. Whether it was social media or crypto, and then now the tech oligarchs.

I tried to call bullshit on some of those things or examine the downsides and the negative externalities. I also think, frankly, I was responding to some deficiencies that I saw in tech journalism. I think there are a lot of great people on this beat, and more now than before, even if the institutions often let us down. But when I was writing about social media in 2012, people thought that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg could do no wrong. Or at least he was sort of this benign nerd.

At the same time, I was talking to academics, activists and others who saw a whole other side of things. I think that’s what attracted me. There seemed to be this other story to be told — other criticisms and analytical power to be brought to the situation that people at The New York Times or elsewhere were ignoring.

Looking at your most recent book, what did you know about Elon Musk going into it? And then what was your biggest insight from writing the book?

When I was working on the book, I was also working on a podcast for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), four episodes, about Musk’s childhood and political formation.

I think a couple of things that I found notable were when he was in high school, he didn’t really stick out very much. I mean, he was just another nerd. Granted, [he was] living in this very unusual setting of apartheid South Africa where he was part of the dominant majority, albeit English-descended and not Afrikaners, but certainly part of the ruling white overclass. What I think he’s taken away from his own upbringing is a constant sense of superiority. In any room, [feeling] his inherent superiority and right to rule.

I think the other thing is that we have to take him at his word. When he talks about something like the “woke mind virus,” there is a ridiculousness to Musk, but fascism is ridiculous and over the top: Hitler giving his sweaty speeches while his minions marched in Hugo Boss-designed uniforms. However, Musk, I think, believes a lot of things he says.

The “woke mind virus” stuff came from, by his own account, his daughter coming out as trans. She changed her name and said in her name change application that she didn’t want to be associated with her father, and she later said that her father had bullied her for being queer.

Musk has, in interviews, spun it very differently and said, “the ‘woke mind virus’ killed my son.” I think that was sort of eye-opening for me. We imagine some of this stuff is a certain degree of kayfabe or there’s some play here. What I keep finding, especially with Musk and his peers, is this kind of paranoid removal from society and common experience that they seem to embody. Particularly in Musk’s case, he seems to take from science fiction not any sense of allegory or criticism for the way we might live, but a blueprint. It’s a blueprint for how he wants to live.

Musk and these other guys, especially people like Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel, inhabit a much different psychological space than we do. That can be hard to suss out, but at the same time, I think they mean it when they have these ridiculous tweets about how migrants are going to overrun the land, or Marc Andreessen saying that introspection is a sign of weakness. There’s a performative nature to it, but also that is who they are and they are different from a lot of us.

The audacity of Elon Musk

The story of the internet — and how it’s been broken — is very much the story of Elon Musk. In 1999, the then 28-year-old South African tech mogul had thinning hair, a baby face, and a little over $300 million in his pocket, which he scored after selling his software company, Zip2, to Compaq computers. “I think the internet is the, the super-set of all media,” he told a reporter around that time. “It allows consumers to choose what they want to see, when they want to see it.”

Nearly 25 years later, in October 2022, he’d buy Twitter for $44 billion and rename it X.com, in a bid to control that super-set he had prophesized decades before. “Feeds were quickly inundated with some of the darkest videos to ever grace the internet,” says Garrett Graff reports in Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. “Videos of real murders, of violent porn, of animals getting hurt and people fighting. Racist rhetoric, misogyny, deepfakes, and viral conspiracy thrived — and Musk was one of the biggest consumers of the content there.”

Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns, this podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before. Across seven episodes, it retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”

The full season of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is available now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Yeah. Obviously, Musk just became a trillionaire. He’s become even more extreme lately. What do you think about how he’s changed in recent years, especially since your book was completed?

I think, unfortunately, we have to be kind of attentive to what is occupying Elon Musk. I’m not saying that everyone has to be on X or anything, but we are subjected to his interests and whims. When he decides to foment racist violence somewhere, it’s just one small piece of what Musk has been agitating for a while now.

I mean, I’ve certainly been paying attention. When he spoke at a Tommy Robinson rally via video link, he was saying that people in the UK need to be ready for violence. Violence was coming to them, whether they liked it or not. He was specific that this was going to come from migrants. So I think it’s very grim. It’s very dark. We have to pay attention through the election, through the midterms. While he can’t really maintain focus and interest long enough to, say, have his own political party, I think we need to understand that he is going to be this messy, influential force in our politics for the foreseeable future.

We have to be watching where his money is going. But I expect him to be a MAGA loyalist going into the midterms.

What keeps you up at night? What do you think about a lot and you’re like, “Oh, this is the thing that could really screw us?”

That’s a good question. Right now, I worry about this fusion of corporate and government power. On one side, Silicon Valley has made this bargain for its own power and for money. So they’re not regulated. They can have tons of government contracts. Trump will subsidize the AI boom.

The bargain that they’ve made is that if they even care, they’ll tolerate basically unlimited corruption from Trump, his family, and his cronies. That clearly doesn’t bother them. It’s something also that they’re willing to facilitate through Trump’s crypto businesses and things like that. So it’s that partnership, I think, that disturbs me.

I worry not only about how do we have any checks on the power of some of these individuals, like Musk, but what do we do when the load-bearing institutions of civil society, weak as they were, have just been knocked over. Crime is basically legal if you’re in power or closely connected to power. I really think this is unprecedented, at least for our country.

What do you think about the future of the journalism industry? Are you worried? Hopeful?

In general, a dominant feeling is that the news industry or the media industry continues to be in a downward spiral. Journalism can’t just survive on The New York Times and NPR or whatever. I think that just the simple fact that there are many fewer people working in journalism now than there were, even when I started as a freelancer in 2008, is deeply depressing. That’s not the sign of a healthy society.

On the other hand, there are so many people doing amazing work, and some people on an individual basis are able to make it work with newsletters or having a very specialized beat or publication. There are people who have been building some new publications like Zeteo or Dropsite.

I am very heartened anytime I see that someone is actually able to surmount the tremendous number of obstacles that are there to not just succeeding as an individual on Substack or wherever else, but to actually create something new that might employ a number of people. I guess my experience has been that it’s hard to make money. I’m happy with the work I’ve done. I’ve been really fortunate to write and publish some books, but the agony for me over the years has been financial.

That’s also required me to decouple my sense of what is good work from what makes me money. That’s been something I’ve struggled with on my own side. How do I get satisfaction from this stuff by doing work that feels good or worthwhile or representative of what I want to do while also being able to pay bills? I think that’s what I worry about for myself and for other writers. On a mass scale, we’re just not there.

I love people’s creativity, whether they’re doing a YouTube show or some other video project or actually publishing really interesting or aggressive stuff on Substack or another newsletter platform, but not everyone can be that entrepreneurial. We do need institutions.

It can be great to be a freelancer. You don’t necessarily have to answer to the same people, but sometimes you also need support. You need resources or you need lawyers or you need editors who have your back. That can be helpful. It can be very exciting to do things on your own, but sometimes you lose out by not having those things or not having that supportive institution behind you.

What do you want to do next? What are you focused on?

I think political corruption, especially as enabled by crypto and the tech industries, is deeply important right now — and illicit finance. This is maybe a little bit more of an answer to the last question, but in some ways, what also worries me, or one thing I’m thinking about a lot, is how the media can succeed amidst these difficulties and this kind of broader corruption.

One of the things we’ve seen is that people are afraid or don’t want to cover serious issues that might get them sued, or might get them attacked by the Trump administration. It has been a problem for me sometimes that I can’t get certain things published because some media organizations don’t want to take on the risks, even if they know the work is true.

That’s something I think about on a personal level. How am I going to get XYZ published? Not everyone has to be so courageous or anything like that, but we do have to try to do what’s right and not preemptively concede. I think preemptively conceding to power is one of the worst things you can do as a journalist.

Further reading from Jacob Silverman:

• “One Year Into Trump 2.0, Elon Musk Is Still Poised to Be Kingmaker” (The Nation, January 20, 2026)

• “Teapot Dome. Watergate. They’re nothing compared with this.” (The New York Times, October 17, 2025)

• “Tech execs say the darnedest things” (Business Insider, March 19, 2026)

• “Keyboard warriors” (Business Insider, April 15, 2026)

Kade Krichko’s career as a travel writer and journalist is, perhaps, as close as one can get to living out the fantasy of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Unknown.”

In Krichko’s own words, he has “reported from the barbed wire surf scenes of Lebanon, to the cradle of skiing’s origins in China, to Cuba’s nascent skate movement, and many places in between” for the likes of The New York Times, ESPN, Condé Nast Traveler, VICE, and Outside. In those years on the road — spending as much as 180 days of the year in the world’s most bizarre and remote places — he realized some essential things about the beating heart of great travel writing. Among them, an inconvenient truth: Sometimes the very best travel writing comes not from those who are outsiders to the land, but rather those who know its contours intimately as a local.

“I still think I did those stories justice. But what I learned while I was out there was that I had a lot of help. I was working with fixers, translators, other journalists, professors, and sources in these areas,” Krichko says. “I started to realize — or just became interested in — getting their perspectives on similar stories.”

Enter Ori Magazine. In 2023, Krichko founded the print-only travel publication emphasizing visual storytelling and narrative journalism. He built its bones by first calling back some of the folks he met on the road and asking them what they were seeing in their own communities. It quickly became a globally distributed publication-plus-reporting-grant for journalists to write the ambitious travel stories they were longing to write, and for readers to read the stories they were longing to see about the great big world “out there.”

Krichko says that while the magazine centers local storytellers, great travel writing can, and should, come from anywhere and anyone. In this edition of Depth Perception, he talks about how the combination of local wisdom and an outsider’s fresh eyes can make stories sing, how Jon Krakauer’s writing changed his life, and how even a globally minded publication can still make a tangible impact on their own block. —Kelly Kimball

What inspired you to create Ori Magazine?

Ori Magazine was a project many years in the making. I call myself a reluctant business owner because that journey was not necessarily supposed to lead to running a magazine. But I’ve been a freelance journalist my entire career and was able to be semi-in-house at a couple of outdoor publications and see how the sausage was made. Through that process, I figured out that there might be a way to slightly tweak the model and create something special.

So that, I would say, is the very glossed-over version of how Ori was born in 2023. But I also like to say it was a project born from frustration. As you know very well, the freelance world is tough. You have to get a pitch through one editor, much less three or four editors, and then write it. By the time that happens, maybe the story’s completely changed, right?

And so I wanted to provide a new platform for people who had either worked with me before or whose work I was interested in so we could get down to business a little bit quicker. We live in the travel space. We are a travel magazine. But I found that it was a realm I didn’t know as much about and wasn’t necessarily that interested in, for the sole reason that I wasn’t really interested in the types of stories that were being told.

I wanted to see if we could enter that space and do something a little bit different. That’s where we kind of made our mark as a travel magazine, working with local contributors in the places where they’re based. So instead of sending someone like myself to Lagos, Nigeria, to write about Afrobeats, we’re finding the premier music journalist from Lagos to talk about his home city. That slight shift in perspective, we found, was a really cool way to tell these stories.

You’ve reported from some of the most remote and exciting places in the world. Why the decision now to turn to local journalists?

These are great questions that I’ve flipped over in my brain many, many times because, as you mentioned, I was out there doing it. I was traveling more than 180 days a year to pretty remote locations and remote communities and, in my mind, doing the best job I could. I was as objective and as educated as I could be going into those places … [and] I had a lot of help.

A whole lot of them were either educators or local storytellers. That really stuck with me when I went home. Obviously, we had a bit of a break with COVID and traveling wasn’t happening as much. I started to realize — or just became interested in — getting their perspectives on similar stories. So this project started as me calling a lot of those people back and asking what was going on.

I’m not saying that is the ultimate correct way to do things. That’s just a decision that I made and have been pursuing, and in a way, shifted my own career as a writer. We’re in year three, and I just wrote my first article for my own magazine.

Do you still see the value in journalists reporting on a place that they aren’t necessarily from?

I think there is absolutely a place for people to travel somewhere new with a fresh perspective, an open mind, and an open heart, and report on that. I say this about photography all the time: If you live on the same city block for 20 years, you’re probably not going out every day and taking a picture of that block anymore. But if somebody visits, they’re going to notice the birdhouse that you’ve walked by a million times.

The dream scenario, and something we’ve dabbled with quite a bit at Ori, is sending a photographer to meet a local writer so we have both perspectives in one piece. I think there’s a lot of value in that. I’ve learned through three years that even if I had this really idealistic mission, that mission can shift and still accomplish the goal.

Take a deep dive into immersive multimedia journalism

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

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

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

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

I’d love to talk about the genre of travel writing overall. Where do you see Ori Magazine meeting a need right now?

Jon Krakauer was always a huge influence for me. I grew up reading Outside magazine, and he was the first one while I was growing up to turn a long-form feature into a book, and then a book into a movie. All of a sudden, something that was a singular event took on an entirely new life.

I read “Into Thin Air” and was greatly affected by it. Throughout journalism school, I said I wanted to write for Outside magazine as a result. I got there way earlier than I thought. I did write for Outside, and then I was actually at a party in Seattle, probably two or three years out of school. I was talking with this girl, and she was leaving the party early to go hiking because she was training for a mission to go to Everest Base Camp.

I was really impressed by that, and she said, “Yeah, it’s not as cool as you think. It’s kind of a long story.” I said, “Well, you’re talking to the right person. If you don’t mind letting me know what you mean by that.” She said, “Well, my dad was involved in an accident on Everest in ‘96, and he’s kind of well known in the mountain community. His name’s Scott Fischer.”

I kind of spit out my coffee, (I wasn’t even drinking any) and said, “Wow. No, I know your dad. I read about him in ‘Into Thin Air.’” She just looked at me deadpan and said, “Jon Krakauer ruined my life.”

The book came out very quickly after the article and there were some factual discrepancies that are still being argued over today. Basically, she was a five-year-old girl who was caught up in losing her dad while also hearing stories about him that she didn’t know whether or not they were true .

That really hit me. I had never met my hero, and all of a sudden I’m hearing that my hero might have unintentionally done some harm to a little girl in Seattle. That turned into a much larger conversation, and over a two- to three-year period, we actually wrote a follow-up story that was published in Seattle Met. I realized just how important our words are and how important the people are who tell them.

That was a message I’ve carried with me throughout all of this, and it definitely wraps into the work we do with Ori. For a lot of us, some of these stories are us passing through. For some of the people helping us report them, this is their life.

I love the concept of the Ori Creative Grant. How did you come up with the idea? And, looking ahead, how do you intend to keep building upon it?

The Ori Creative Grant was a tenet we basically built this operation on. It is another product of frustration in the freelance industry and the fact that journalists don’t receive bonuses. Maybe we get an award and make a little extra money off of that, but very rarely do we have direct interaction with people who can appreciate and reward our work for what it’s worth.

So what we built into Ori, in addition to paying pretty competitive rates, is a subscriber participation element to our model. We essentially take 2% of all subscription revenue and put it into a growing bank account. Obviously, the more subscribers and members we have, the larger that account grows. After each issue, we give folks a couple of months to read it, and then we turn around and ask them what their favorite material from the issue was. In that way, we’re inviting our audience to participate and give us feedback on the issue and, more importantly, on the people who put the issue together — these global creatives.

We then award a winner based on the votes, and that money is handed over as a non-binding grant to fund their next project. Essentially, if they have an idea they’ve been meaning to get off the ground but just need that little bit of a boost, this is hopefully part of what allows them to approach another publication, or come back to us, and actually bring those stories to life.

This is our way of giving a green light without having it be publication-dependent. We want to see these stories made. We think the world’s a better place when storytellers are doing what they’re meant to do. So it’s idealistic, but it’s based on real experiences — my own personal experiences — of not getting that green light.

I also think it brings our readers closer to the people producing the stories at a time when media distrust is at an all-time high. It’s hard to tell somebody that their news is fake when you funded their grant and voted for their story. There’s some buy-in there from the public. I want writers and readers to be closer together, and I want those readers who voted for that grant to follow that writer’s career and see where they publish their story.

As a writer, how are you thinking about travel journalism now? Are you approaching it differently, or does it still feel the same, just with new experiences from Ori in your back pocket?

I’m still doing it. I definitely don’t want people to think, through my descriptions of Ori, that there’s a holier-than-thou element to what we’re doing. I think there are a lot of good travel publications out there that are following a more traditional path, so much so that I’m still writing for some of them.

But for me personally, if I’m going to write for Ori, I’m going to stick within our model. I live in Seattle, Washington, and I just wrote a piece about grass in Central Washington. I swear it’s more exciting than it sounds. We actually got out on the World Cup grass and learned a little bit about how these stadiums come together at the last second. It was pretty nerdy, but very fun.

In the meantime, I wrote about a Basque climbing syndicate that shut down an active mine in Spain. I wrote a profile of a skier in France. I’ve written from Chile. I’m not stopping, necessarily. I have learned a lot through Ori, though, and I think I am more intentional. I am slower. I’m spending longer in places when I’m producing stories, and I’m producing fewer stories, to be honest. But [they‘re] stories that I’m proud of, so I hope to keep that momentum rolling. I’m still writing as much as I am editing, and I think it’s important to keep those two flames alive.

As you mentioned with the Ori grant, sometimes people just need funding for the things they’re meant to write. I’m wondering if there are any specific writers where you can tell they’re doing exactly the thing they’re meant to do?

I’m also realizing I didn’t answer part of your grant question, so I’m going to answer that first and then dovetail into this. With the Creative Grant, we’ve been able to fund projects in a bunch of different places. Our first four grants funded projects in Mexico, West Papua, Indonesia, Peru, and, most recently, New York City. New York City was by far the most familiar location on that list, but each one of those winners — and this wasn’t by intention or design — was a female writer, and most of them were female photographers as well. I’m not sure what that says. I just think it’s cool.

As far as writers who are inspiring me right now and really seem to be living their “writer truth,” Heather Hansman is an outdoors writer that I really admire. She has done the circuit through outdoor and adventure publications, but she’s now writing books on women in the American West, conservation, outdoor recreation, and public policy.

I just feel like that’s something she was always meant to do. She’s very much from the Jon Krakauer school of narrative nonfiction, and she brings some pretty dense topics to life. I’m one of the worst reading writers out there, but I can cruise through anything she writes.

Ori is a Seattle-based magazine that writes travel stories from around the world. I’m curious about some of the local work you’ve done?

I think the only new thing I’d like to mention about what we’re doing is that we’ve taken this very locals-first positioning on something that’s quite global. We’re a Seattle-based international magazine, and I always had this thought: We’re bringing the world to Seattle, but how are we projecting Seattle to the world?

We recently reorganized as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and a big part of that is that we’re now running after-school programs in Seattle. They’re essentially carrying the Ori ethos of backyard storytelling to a new generation of storytellers. So, on top of all these hats I’m wearing, I’m also teaching this course. We just finished our first semester at Garfield High School, which is a public high school here in Seattle, as a pilot program, and we’re looking to expand to more public schools.

I’ve pitched so many stories from here to national publications and had them say, “Oh, that’s not really the Seattle we know. Seattle is tech. Seattle is coffee. Seattle is grunge.” And I’m like, “Have you checked out the hip-hop, though? It’s pretty good.” There is a whole lot going on in the music world [here].

I wanted to foster that curiosity in a younger generation. Over 12 weeks, we created a little zine, and we just held a zine launch. It was a beautifully designed zine. Inside are these beautiful long-form features from the students. They did a great job. We held a public showing at the gallery we work with in town and then wrapped that into our last Ori launch party. We had the students at the party, and they were able to interact with our community and share their work. It all felt very full circle, and very much like what we’re supposed to be doing.

Yes, we’re branching out and connecting this larger global community, but we’re also building one at home.

Further reading from Kade Krichko:

• “The Many Lifetimes of Seattle’s Panama Hotel” (Alta, Sept. 29, 2023)

• “24 hours of love and loss in Madrid’s La Latina” (Adventure, July 20, 2022)

• “Training for Big-Wave Surfing? It’s All in Your Head.” (Outside Magazine, Nov. 22, 2020)

• “China’s Stone Age Skiers and History’s Harsh Lessons” (The New York Times, April 19, 2017)

• “The Last Pinareño” (Victory Journal, Summer 2018)

• “Katie Rose on Top of the World: An Everest Story 20 Years in the Making” (Seattle Met, April 25, 2016)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long Shadow podcast: How Elon Musk broke the internet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Eoin Higgins:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An epic government scandal hiding in plain sight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading and listening from Jessica Lussenhop:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that you’re right about that.

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

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

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

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

Uncovering Sports Illustrated’s forgotten pioneer

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

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

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

Sure. Of course. Without a doubt.

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

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

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

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

He loved that song, by the way.

Donald Trump’s favorite also.

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

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

Because they frame your face.

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

It puts your face up on a little pedestal.

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Tom Junod:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The latest from Long Lead:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading and listening from Kim Cross:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many on the left also get it wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Less lethal” means “still deadly”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Christopher Mathias:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Confronting the cause — and effect — of COVID misinformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are you paying for this independence?

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

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

No stickers. Maybe season two I should do merch.

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

How long did it take to finish the first season?

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

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

Read more from Depth Perception:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading and listening from Thomas Goetz:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The big picture: Documenting Mexico City’s water crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from David Roberts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A nation of laws or a nation of guns?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Elliot Williams:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you had another pretty sizable story not long ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from from Depth Perception:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from Roger Sollenberger:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further listening, reading, and viewing from David Sirota:

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

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

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

• Master Plan (Sept. 2025, Lever Books)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further reading from G. Elliott Morris:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then The Times killed the position.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s keeping you up at night?

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

What’s making you hopeful right now?

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

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

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

Further reading from Margaret Sullivan:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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)