Talk Therapy

Over its glorious twelve-year run, the Longform podcast offered its listeners a reliable mixture of three things: story, utility and free unlicensed therapy. Margalit Fox let us in behind the scenes of the obituaries at the New York Times, while Keith Gessen recounted the early days of n+1. Practicing journalists could collect tips and reportorial stratagems—if Gwyneth Paltrow grants you only two forty-minute interviews, just invite yourself to her home like Taffy Brodesser-Akner did. But I think the reason many writers, seasoned veterans and young hopefuls alike, kept coming back to it was the third thing: the podcast was group therapy for a trying profession in a trying time.  

For the uninitiated, Longform is—alas, was—a weekly podcast featuring “a nonfiction writer on how they tell stories.” Coiled into about an hour was a blend of Song Exploder and the Paris Review’s Art of Nonfiction. A typical episode would begin by asking “How did you get into journalism?” and anatomize the guest’s body of work. You might learn about the logistics of being a weekly book critic (Parul Sehgal) or the economics of freelancing from Yukon (Eva Holland). Writers were judiciously sampled for both timeliness and timelessness: revisiting Renata Adler’s takedown of Pauline Kael one week and inviting Michael Schulman to talk about his viral profile of Jeremy Strong in another. It struck an impossible balance—intimate shoptalk that never sounded like inside baseball, a master class of sorts that wasn’t grandstanding.  

What made it different? For one, its trio of rotating hosts, like the three heads of Cerberus: Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff. This format, a rare configuration for a podcast, gave the hosts more freedom to take on guests they’d individually vibe with. Janet Malcolm once claimed that interview subjects “will tell their story to anyone who will listen to it, and the story will not be affected by the behavior or personality of the listener.” It’s a pronouncement I’ve long harbored suspicions about, and one for which the Longform podcast offered a strong counterproof: since the three hosts were so distinct, even if they each had on the very same guest their episodes would have turned out entirely different. In the penultimate “Mailbag” episode, one listener offered a characterization of their styles: Evan the technical, Aaron the philosophical, Max the emotional. 

Ratliff has an air of professorial calm about him that unfailingly brings stability—like a deft pilot who can make an emergency landing feel like cruise control—to the often unpredictable business of interviewing. His gravitas is well-earned. (Go read his reporting; many of his stories are high-octane, organized crime investigations that can make enemies of drug kingpins.) 

Lammer is indeed philosophical, but in a folksy, stoner-intellect way. He often insists he’s not a journalist, asking what he hedges as “dumb questions” but that end up yielding the most protein-packed answers. He’s also a funny interviewer, but his rarer talent is that he can coax the same humor and ease from his guests. 

Linsky, meanwhile, knows how to uncork something in even the most cagey guests, somehow putting them in a confessional mood. He knocks on their interiority without trespassing on it, and the guests who began more guardedly eventually warm up to him—the very final episode, with John Jeremiah Sullivan, is one such example.  

At a time when there’s a podcast for everything—from the history of gnomes to the rise of shipping containers to interviews with inanimate objects—the topic of longform writing may not be mainstream but isn’t exactly niche. During its run, however, the regnant journalism podcast had no real competitor. 

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When I found Longform, around 2015, a vague desire to write had been long-gestating. But growing up, I didn’t know any writers, nor was I raised in a particularly intellectual household. The show, where the guests unspooled the tedium, travails and triumphs of this enterprise, provided my first real touchpoint.  

Midway through my junior year of college, once it became evident that I wouldn’t be able to stay in this country without the extension granted only to STEM majors, I switched my major from philosophy to computer science. I felt both apologetic about the compromise—to whom I don’t know—and oddly violated, stripped of the more bookish identity I had formed. Rage-listening to the podcast was one way to counterbalance my sense of deprivation. By my senior year, I mustered enough courage to sign up for my first journalism course.​ 

I admit that consuming media for therapeutic effect can be a third-rate mode of engagement, but sometimes you need a repository of consolations. Finding out George Saunders studied geophysical engineering disabused me of my feelings of fraudulence about being a writer with an engineering degree. During the periods when I could not write—my work visa forbade me from engaging in activities outside my official employment—I returned to episodes featuring writers who had odd day jobs before turning to writing full-time, like Sheelah Kolhatkar (hedge-fund analyst) and Jerry Saltz (truck driver), as I schemed to do the same. 

Journalism is an opaque industry. I knew I should’ve been soliciting help, but doing so does not come easy to me. With Longform, I could spy on the inner workings of the industry without becoming a nuisance.  

Is it tacky to share what I learned? Not that I have much to offer—I never took scrupulous notes. What left the strongest impression were the show’s moments of self-understanding: Nicholson Baker on being at ease with not being—and having never been—part of a writerly community; Elizabeth Kolbert on the tension between activism and journalism; Tom Bissell on how, as a young writer, he tried to “rewire and change the world with the beauty of language alone” but learned to relax the impossible demands writers place on their prose. Here’s something I did write down, from that same interview with Tom Bissell:  

Aaron Lammer: Your friend Gideon Lewis-Kraus tells us that when you first met, you told him “there are two kinds of writers in the world: writers who help other writers and writers who don’t.” 

I could not call myself a writer back then, but it seemed clear enough that I wanted to be the first kind.

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The final episodes have a bonfire-at-midnight energy. The trio look back and thank their colleagues over the years. At one point, Lammer mentions that the notes to editors they send after taping each episode all sound the same: to expunge as much of themselves as possible. “Early on,” says Lammer, “we even talked about, ‘Could this show work basically as an unbroken monologue by the guest?’” 

It was then that I realized how little they revealed about themselves. The intro segment had occasional news—parenthood, a podcast launch, a book publication—but all too brief, as if anxious to jump to the main show, lest they capitalize on their own platform. How unlike me, who just smuggled my own story into a tribute to their work. 

That the qualities that make a good interview are not additive in nature but eliminative—not about the inclusion of the hosts’ clever repartee but the erasure of ego—is common wisdom that not everyone has the will to follow through. In that sense, good podcast interviews may be likened to a stenciled picture: the hosts are essential to the process, but it is their removal that completes the image. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Longform has now come to an end. Still, some of us are waiting for someone—or better yet, a trio—to pick up where they left off.