Episode 580: Rachel Khong

Jay Caspian Kang is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a co-host of Time to Say Goodbye. “At some point, you have to kick it out the door, and it’s never finished to the degree that you would finish a magazine piece. But it, in some ways, is more interesting because it is produced in a short amount of time, and it’s read as something that is not supposed to be complete. It’s just meant to provoke or to provide thought or whatever, to provide some sort of context on a certain issue or not. And I actually like that a lot better than the magazine writing. I respect the magazine writers—obviously, I was one—but for my disposition now, in my lifestyle, I actually enjoy having to produce this thing every week.” Have a question for the mailbag? Email the show or leave a voicemail at (929) 333-2908. Show notes: @jaycaspiankang Kang on Longform Kang on Longform Podcast (Oct 2021) Kang on Longform Podcast (Aug 2017) Kang on Longform Podcast (Apr 2013) Kang’s New Yorker archive 06:00 Coin Talk 08:00 Tyler Austin Harper’s Atlantic archive 10:00 Serial 12:00 The Daily 20:00 “The High Is Always the Pain and the Pain Is Always the High” (The Morning News • Oct 2010) 28:00 James (Percival Everett • Doubleday • 2024) 34:00 “American Son” (ESPN • July 2024) 35:00 Kang’s VICE archive 42:00 “Mike Francesa Still Believes in the Power of Radio” (New York Times • Aug 2018) 43:00 Kang’s Grantland archive 43:00 Kang’s New York Times archive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Joseph Cox is a cybersecurity journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. His new book is Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever. “In the not too distant future, I will be a very old man, and maybe I won't be able to spend all day talking to drug traffickers. I will be mentally and physically exhausted. So I will doggedly pursue the story right now while I can.” Show notes: @josephfcox Cox's 404 Media archive Cox's Vice archive Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever (PublicAffairs • 2024) 08:00 "FBI’s Encrypted Phone Platform Infiltrated Hundreds of Criminal Syndicates; Result is Massive Worldwide Takedown" (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of California • Jun 2021) 10:00 Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World (Bradley Hope and Tom Wright • Hachette • 2018) 19:00 "Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI" (404 Media • Sep 2023) 38:00 "Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs on Silk Road’s Black Market" (Andy Greenberg • Forbes • Sep 2013) 41:00 "Hundreds of Bounty Hunters Had Access to AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint Customer Location Data for Years" (Motherboard • Feb 2019) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Tavi Gevinson is a writer, actor, and the founder of Rookie. Her new zine is Fan Fiction. “Stories are unstable, and memory is unstable, and identity is unstable. All of these things that I've tried to make permanent in writing, they're actually unstable. So even though it's tempting to go, Oh, that was fake, it's more like, No, it was just temporary.” Show notes: @tavitulle tavigevinson.world Gevinson on Longform Gevinson on Longform Podcast Gevinson’s Rookie archive 10:00 Operation Shylock (Philip Roth • Simon & Schuster • 1993) 10:00 Erasure (Percival Everett • Graywolf Press • 2011) 14:00 “Taylor Swift Has No Regrets” (Elle • June 2015) 20:00 I Love Dick (Chris Kraus • Semiotext(e) • 1997) 24:00 “Who Would Tavi Gevinson Be Without Instagram?” (New York • Sept 2019) 40:00 “Editor’s Letter” (Rookie • Nov 2018) 50:00 “The Special Panic of Singing Sondheim” (New Yorker • Dec 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Rachel Khong is a journalist and author whose latest novel is Real Americans. “It's about the ways in which we miss each other as human beings and can't fully communicate what it is like to be ourselves. … And I think that's what makes it so interesting to me, to work on a novel and to spend so much time trying to get down on the page what it feels like to be a human being who's alive. … I think the effort itself is what human relationships are.” Show notes: rachelkhong.com 01:00 Real Americans (Knopf • 2024) 01:00 Goodbye, Vitamin (Picador • 2017) 01:00 Lucky Peach archive 01:00 "Would Limitlessness Make Us Better Writers?" (The Atlantic • Apr 2024) 01:00 "Dust to Dust" (Eater • May 2024) 05:00 "New Pornographers + Stars, 6/25 Prospect Park Summer Stage" (Village Voice • Jun 2005) 09:00 Same Bed Different Dreams (Ed Park • Random House • 2023) 12:00 "Inside My Days as a Content Bot" (Esquire • Apr 2024) 24:00 "The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert" (Rumpus • Oct 2012) 24:00 Eat Pray Love (Elizabeth Gilbert • Riverhead • 2007) 24:00 Elizabeth Gilbert's GQ archive 54:00 "The Great Pacific Oyster Trail" (Eater • Jun 2017) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner at Defector.com. She hosts the podcast Normal Gossip and is the author of the upcoming book You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip. “I was always very interested in how you strategize a creative career. And I think that that is an unsexy thing to talk about, right? It's much sexier to be like, Oh, I love working on my sentence-level craft, which is not true for me. But I think that a lot of a creative career is understanding it is still a job, and then understanding how you make sure that within the container of the job you can do the work that you want to do. That is a really difficult balance to make. So if you can understand how people who have done it before you, you can copy them.” Show notes: @mckinneykelsey kelseymckinney.com McKinney on Longform McKinney’s Defector archive 04:00 “Why Doesn’t Mrs. Dalloway Get a Day of Her Own?” (Slate • Jan 2000) 13:00 “Chris Evans: American Marvel” (Edith Zimmerman • GQ • July 2011) 23:00 McKinney’s Deadspin archive 31:00 God Spare the Girls (Harper Collins • 2022) 39:00 “Gossip Is Not a Sin” (New York Times • July 2021) 43:00 You Didn’t Hear This From Me (Viking • 2025) 58:00 “Learning To Play Piano When There Is No Recital” (Defector • Dec 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lissa Soep is an audio producer, editor and author whose latest book is Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations That Never End. “I am so keenly aware of how much my own voice is a product of editing relationships and co-producing relationships with other people's words. … I will forever feel indebted to those then young people who are now writers and educators and therapists. … I feel like my voice is sort of a product of that time.” Show notes: 00:00 Other People’s Words: Friendship, Loss, and the Conversations that Never End (Spiegel & Grau • 2024) 00:00 YR Media 33:00 "Laurie Anderson Has a Message for Us Humans" (Sam Anderson • New York Times Magazine • Oct 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

PJ Vogt is the host of Search Engine. “One of our tests editorially is if we think we’ve got something good, but we haven’t started reporting or recording on it, I’ll just try asking the question at dinner and stuff. If it derails conversations, that’s a really good sign.” Show notes: @PJVogt Vogt’s Substack Vogt on Longform Podcast 03:00 “Why Are There So Many Illegal Weed Stores in New York City? (Part 1)” (Search Engine • Mar 2024) 03:00 “Why Are There So Many Illegal Weed Stores in New York City? (Part 2)” (Search Engine • April 2024) 03:00 “When Do You Know It’s Time to Stop Drinking?” (Search Engine • Jan 2024) 08:00 “Why Are There So Many Chicken Bones on the Street? (Part 1)” (Search Engine • Jan 2024) 08:00 “Why Are There So Many Chicken Bones on the Street? (Part 2)” (Search Engine • Jan 2024) 13:00 “Is There a Sane Way to Use the Internet?” (Search Engine • Oct 2023) 15:00 “How Do You Survive Fame?” (Search Engine • Feb 2024) 15:00 “The Tao of Rick Rubin” (New York Times • The Ezra Klein Show • Feb 2023) 15:00 “Rick Rubin Says Trust Your Gut, Not Your Audience” (Bari Weiss • The Free Press • Mar 2023) 16:00 “Rick Rubin, The Seclusive Zen Master” (Tim Ferriss • Jan 2023) 16:00 “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (Gay Talese • Esquire • April 1966) 18:00 The Ezra Klein Show 18:00 Fresh Air 19:00 Crypto Island (Jigsaw Productions • 2022) 26:00 “Do Political Yard Signs Actually Do Anything?” (Search Engine • Apr 2024) 27:00 Reply All 35:00 “What’s Going on With Elon Musk?” (Search Engine • July 2023) 38:00 “What’s It Like to Go Blind? (Search Engine • July 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lindsay Peoples is the editor-in-chief of The Cut. “You see so many incredible people make one mistake and lose their job or they speak out about something and then the next day something blows up. And so I do think that I often feel like I have to be so careful. And that's hard to do because I'm just naturally curious and I want to know and I want to find and explore and do the things. But I'm aware that … people think I'm too young. I'm too Black. I'm aware of all those things and I'm still going to try.” Show notes: 01:00 "Everywhere and Nowhere: What It’s Really Like to Be Black and Work in Fashion" (The Cut • Aug 2018) 09:00 The Devil Wears Prada (Fox 2000 Pictures • 2006) 29:00 David Haskell on Longform Podcast 31:00 "Should I Leave My Husband? The Lure of Divorce" (Emily Gould • The Cut • Feb 2024) 31:00 "The Day I Put $50,000 in a Shoe Box and Handed It to a Stranger" (Charlotte Cowles • The Cut • Feb 2024) 31:00 "Age Gap Relationships: The Case for Marrying an Older Man" (Grazie Sophia Christie • The Cut • Mar 2024) 50:00 "Is There Room for Fashion Criticism in a Racist Industry?" (The Cut • Aug 2021) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Motlagh, a journalist and filmmaker, is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the founder of Blackbeard Films. He won the Polk's Sydney Schanberg Prize for “This Will End in Blood and Ashes,” an account of the collapse of order in Haiti. “Once you've gotten used to this kind of metabolism, it can be hard to walk away from it. Ordinary life can be a little flat sometimes. And so that's always kind of built in. I accept that. I think I've just tried to be more honest about like, [am I taking this risk] because I need a bump my life? Or do you really believe in what you're doing? And I feel like I really do need to believe in the purpose of the story. There has to be some motivation greater than myself." This is the last in a series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brian Howey is a freelance journalist who won the Polk Award for Justice Reporting after exposing a deceptive police tactic widely used in California. He began the project, which was eventually published by the Los Angeles Times and Reveal, as a graduate student in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. “It’s one thing to hear about this tactic and hear about parents being questioned in this way. It’s another thing entirely to hear the change in a parent’s voice when they realize for the past 20 minutes they’ve been speaking ill of a relative who’s actually been dead the entire time, and to hear that wave of grief and sometimes that feeling of betrayal that cropped up in their voice and how the way that they spoke to the officers afterwards changed.” This is the fourth in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices