Gangrey Podcast

Kathryn Miles is the author of “Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders.” The book, published by Algonquin, officially goes on sale on May 3. “Trailed” is about the 1996 murders of Lolly Winans and Julie Williams. The two young women had entered Virginia's Shenandoah National Park to go on a week-long backcountry camping trip. When they didn't return, park rangers began searching and found a scene of horror at the women's campsite. The murders were never solved. Then, in 2016, on the 20th anniversary of the case, the FBI announced they wanted to reinvestigate. That's when Miles thought she had a magazine story on her hands. “As soon as I started working with the FBI on this case, as soon as I was able to access some of the case files from the court case, it was very obvious to me that this case was much more complicated,” Miles said. “That's when I realized that we weren't talking about a 5,000-word piece here. We were talking about a 100,000-word piece.” This is the second time Miles has been on the podcast. She was a guest on Episode 46 in September 2016, discussing her Boston Globe story about a woman got lost and died while hiking the Appalachian Trail. Miles is the author of five books, including “Quakeland: On the Road to America's Next Devastating Earthquake” and “Super Storm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy.” Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Outside, the Boston Globe, Politico, and more. She's been anthologized by “Best American Essays” and “Best American Sports Writing.”

Mark S. Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who covers health and science for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He is also the author of “Though the Earth Gives Way: A Novel.” That book was published in January by Bancroft Press. The book is an end-of-days look at a small group of people as climate change has wrecked the planet. Host Matt Tullis wanted to talk with Johnson about the book, as well as how his journalism career has helped or hindered his ability to write fiction. Johnson was part of the Pulitzer Prize winning team in 2011 for a series on the groundbreaking use of genetic technology to save a 4-year-old boy. That series was later turned into the book, “One in a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine.” He wrote that book with Kathleen Gallagher. Johnson, a Pulitzer finalist three times, continues to write about health and science in Milwaukee.

Mike Sielski is the author of “The Rise: Kobe Bryant and the Pursuit of Immortality.” Sielski, a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wanted to tell the basketball superstar's origin story after Bryant died in a helicopter crash on January 26, 2020. That's a story that takes place mostly in Philadelphia. Sielski interviewed more than 100 people for the book. He was also assisted by long-time friend Jeremy Treatman, who had been an assistant coach and confidant of Bryant's back in Kobe's high school days. At one point, Treatman and Bryant were working on a memoir focused on Kobe's rookie season in the NBA. As a result, Treatman recorded interviews with Bryant on microcassettes during his senior year. The book never happened, and then Treatman lost the cassettes. He found them just before Christmas in 2020, just three months before Sielski's book was due to his publisher. Hearing Kobe's voice as a teenager helped Sielski get more depth and details that he wouldn't have had otherwise, strengthening the narrative of the book. “The Rise” is Sielski's third book. In 2005, he co-wrote “How to Be Like Jackie Robinson” with Pat Williams. His second book, “Fading Echoes: A True Story of Rivalry and Brotherhood From the Football Field to Fields of Honor” was published in 2009. Sielski was voted Best Sports Columnist by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 2015. In 2010, his story “Dream Derailed” was included in “Best American Sports Writing.”

Chris Jones is the author “The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in the Age of Analytics.” Jones describes the book as the distillation of everything he has learned from creative people over his journalism career. He says he's trying to make the case that analytics are useful, but they have their limitations. “The Eye Test” digs into seven different areas where there are a lot of analytical inputs, but stories of those analytics coming up short. Those chapters include Entertainment, Sports, Weather, Politics, Crime, Money, and Medicine. This is Jones's third book. His most recent book was “Too Far from Home,” which was retitled “Out of Orbit” in paperback. It first came out in 2007. Jones has been on the podcast twice before. He was featured on Episode 17 in January of 2014. At the time, we talked about his Kenneth Feinberg profile that ran in Esquire, as well as his 50th anniversary story on the JFK assassination. In April of 2020, when the pandemic was just getting started, Episode 82 included an interview with Jones focused on the different types of writing he had been doing since leaving Esquire, including screenwriting. Jones was a longtime reporter for Esquire, where he won a National Magazine Award twice, including in 2009 for “The Things That Carried Him.” He was a writer and producer on the Netflix series “Away.” He has written for The New York Times, ESPN: The Magazine, and many other publications.

Chip Scanlan is an award-winning former journalist who has authored or edited a dozen books. His newest book is Writers on Writing: Inside the Lives of 55 Distinguished Writers and Editors. Each writer or editor included in the book was asked the same four questions. The answers to those questions are enlightening to read. Included in the book are Susan Orlean, Dan Barry, Jan Winburn, David Finkel, Roy Peter Clark, and so many more. The book also includes ten writers who have been on this podcast. It's not just journalists featured in the book though. Scanlan included poets and fiction writers. He's covered the entire realm of writing. The end result? Narrative journalists aren't so different from poets after all. Ultimately, we're all just writers. Scanlan has written two journalism textbooks. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and many other places. Two of his essays have been listed as “Notables” in Best American Essays. He publishes the newsletter and blog “Chip's Writing Lessons” and is a regular contributor to Nieman Storyboard. He formerly directed the writing program and the National Writer's Workshops at The Poynter Institute.

Jim Sheeler won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2006 for his story “Final Salute,” which ran in the Rocky Mountain News. The piece focused on Marine Major Steve Beck, who notified families when their loved ones were killed in Iraq and helped them through the mourning process. The story ended up being more than just about Beck, though, as it brought memories of the lives of the dead service members and their families to millions of people. The story was expanded into a book with the same title. That book was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. Sheeler made a name for himself as a reporter by writing feature obituaries about ordinary, everyday people. A collection of those stories can be found in Sheeler's book “Obit.” Sheeler never appeared on Gangrey: The Podcast, although many reporters talked about how they learned lessons from him and his work. He died unexpectedly on September 17. He was 53 years old. This episode remembers Sheeler through stories from a variety of people who knew him. In the introduction, Josh Roiland, an English and journalism professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington talks about how Sheeler helped him out a couple years ago when he was struggling. Included in this episode: Part 1: In October 2019, host Matt Tullis interviewed Sheeler for a writing project he was working on. Tullis recorded that interview and found the audio file after Sheeler died. It's presented here. Part 2: In the days after Sheeler died, Ben Montgomery tweeted a story he's heard Sheeler tell about his middle name - Expedite. Montgomery tells that story. Part 3: Steve Knopper, a freelance writer of 25 years, worked with Sheeler in Boulter in the early 1990s. He also tweeted a remembrance, and tells the story of how he and Sheeler stumbled out of a bar one night at 1 a.m. and found adults riding Big Wheels. Part 4: Anne Nickoloff and Mike McKenna were students of Sheeler's at Case Western Reserve University from 2012-16, and stayed in touch with him afterward. Nickoloff is now a reporter at Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer. McKenna is a fourth-year graduate student in clinical psychology at Ohio State. They tell us what it was like to have Sheeler as a professor. Part 5: Jim Tankersley is a White House correspondent for the New York Times focusing on economics. Back in the early 2000s, he worked with Sheeler at the Rocky Mountain News. They became friends and stayed in touch. Then, in August, Tankersley was named the pool reporter who had to follow President Biden to the Dover Air Force Base to receive the bodies of 13 service members, the last to die in Afghanistan. He reached out to Sheeler for help with that article.

Allison Glock is the type of writer who succeeds in a variety of genres. She writes young adult fiction. She's an executive producer for the NBC series “The Blacklist.” She's written for the New Yorker and Garden & Gun magazine. She's written poetry, and produces short documentary films. In this episode, we start off by talking about an essay she wrote for espnW at the end of 2020. The essay, “Walk, run, or wheelbarrow: We moved our bodies forward during the pandemic,” is about how we dealt with COVID in the days when we were locked down. That essay leads off the new sports anthology series “The Year's Best Sports Writing 2021.” That's a new series started by Glenn Stout. The series, published by Triumph Books, continues the tradition carried on by “Best American Sports Writing,” which ended its run in 2020. Stout talks about the new series at the end of this episode. Glock got her start doing longform narrative for magazines, but has transitioned to film and TV out of economic necessity. She's doing amazing work there, including her work on The Blacklist, and videos made by her production company, Holler Beach Productions. One of the videos produced was about southern women.

Marissa R. Moss is a freelancer who writes about musicians for Rolling Stone, Billboard, American Songwriter, and more. In August, she profiled country music superstar Sturgill Simpson for Rolling Stone. Moss has been writing about music for years. She writes a lot about country musicians, partially because she lives in Nashville. But also because she loves the storytelling aspect of it. Moss has written about Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Tanya Tucker, Eric Church, Miranda Lambert, and more. She was given the Best Music Reporter award by Nashville Scene in 2019. Now she is putting the finishing touches on her first book. “Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed To Be” will be published by Henry Holt and Company. It goes on sale in May 2022.

Kent Babb is a sports feature writer for the Washington Post. He writes about the NFL, college sports, the NBA, and the intersections of sports with social, cultural, and political issues. We talked about his new book, Across the River: Life, Death, and Football in an American City. It was published by HarperOne in August. Across the River is a riveting look at a high school football team in a part of New Orleans few of us ever hear about. It's a team made up of players and coaches who have to deal with shootings and murder on a regular basis. Babb is also one of the writers included in The Year's Best Sports Writing 2021. That's the new anthology created by Glenn Stout. The book goes on sale October 5. Babb's story ran in the Washington Post, and is about Anthony Guiliani, Rudy's son, and his questionable job at the White House.

Jason Fagone is a narrative writer for the San Francisco Chronicle who focuses on in-depth stories and investigations. His most recent piece is headlined “The Jessica Simulation.” It's about a man who used a website that created chatbots to bring his dead girlfriend, or memories of her, back to life. “Joshua was able to use this website project assembler to create a custom chat bot simulation of his dead girlfriend Jessica, and he began to talk, have these very long, intense emotional conversations with this simulation of Jessica and then things go Very weird,” he said. Fagone joined the Chronicle in the fall of 2017 after a solid career of freelancing and book writing. He has been on the podcast before. Fagone was the guest on Episode 9 back in September 2013. At the time, we talked about some of his work in Philadelphia magazine, including a story about a cancer researcher who had a breakthrough discovery. We also talked about his book “Ingenious.” Since that episode, Fagone has written two more books, giving him three in all. That includes “The Woman Who Smashed Codes,” which was released in 2017. Fagone has written for Esquire, Wired, GQ, Huffington Post, and Mother Jones, among many other publications.

John Branch is a sports reporter at the New York Times, and the author of “Sidecountry: Tales of Death and Life from the Back Roads of Sports. The book was published on June 1 by W. W. Norton. “Sidecountry” is a collection of stories Branch has written for the New York Times about sports and athletic activities that take place outside of the mainstream sports world. Included in the book is “Snow Fall,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 2013. There are other stories, like the one about a bowler who rolled his first perfect game and died just minutes later. Branch also includes his piece on a Rubik's Cube competition (this story was anthologized in Best American Sports Writing 2019), and his series on the Lady Jaguars, a girls basketball team that never won a game. “I just love the idea of trying to illuminate a story that otherwise wouldn't get illuminated,” Branch says. In 2010, Branch profiled the greatest horseshoe pitcher of all time, Alan Francis. Host Matt Tullis also profiled Francis in 2007 for the Columbus Dispatch, and later wrote about Francis's main rival, Brian Simmons in 2012 for SB Nation. Branch has been at the New York Times since 2005. He won the Pulitzer in 2013, and was a finalist in 2012 for his series of stories on a professional hockey player who overdosed on painkillers. Sidecountry is Branch's third book. “The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West” was published in 2018.

Travis M. Andrews is a features reporter at the Washington Post and the author of “Because He’s Jeff Goldblum: The Movies, Memes, and Meaning of Hollywood’s Most Enigmatic Actor.” The book was published by Plume on May 4. The book is what Andrews calls a semi-biography, semi-celebration of Jeff Goldblum. It also looks into the shifting nature of fame and celebrity. The book came about after Andrews wrote a piece on Goldblum for the Post. While he didn’t talk with Goldblum for this book - the actor, or his publicist, passed, Andrews did talk to upwards of 80 people who have worked with Goldblum before. He also read every single interview that Goldblum’s given, and watched every single movie Goldblum has appeared in. Andrews writes for the Washington Post’s Style section, where he covers the Internet, pop culture, and the ways we live now. Recently, he wrote about Adam Sandler, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Yang. He often writes about TikTok, including a piece on the No. 1 TikTok poster in the world. Before joining the Post, Andrews was an associate travel and culture editor for Southern Living. He’s also written for Time, Esquire, GQ, and the Atlantic, among others.

Sean Flynn is the author “Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird.” The book was published by Simon & Schuster, and went on sale on May 11. Flynn’s book is certainly about peacocks, but also so much more. It’s a reported memoir that examines his life as a reporter and how it has impacted his family, and how the animals he takes care of fits into that. He gives credit for this book idea to his editor, Sean Manning. Flynn has spent his life writing about traumatic events that involved other people. He won a National Magazine Award for his story “The Perfect Fire.” The story is about six firefighters who died in a warehouse fire in Massachusetts, and ran in the July 2000 issue of Esquire. He’s written about Tamir Rice, the 12 year old Cleveland boy who police killed in a city park. He’s written about mass killings in New Zealand and Norway. Flynn has written three books. He’s a correspondent for GQ. Aside from books and magazine work, Flynn has also written for television, film, and audio.

Hannah Smith is a reporter, writer, producer, and host of the first season of a new podcast called The Opportunist. That first season was focused on a woman named Sherry Shriner, the leader of an online cult that believed most humans were alien reptiles out to kill them. The Opportunist is produced by Kast Media. As a podcast, it will focus on true stories of regular people who turn sinister simply by being opportunistic. The second season is set to start in June. Smith got started in the world of podcasting at Maximum Fun, working on comedy and interview podcasts. She worked on a parenting show called Bad Mother, as well as the award-winning courtroom comedy Judge John Hodgman. She’s worked in almost every kind of genre of podcasting, including news, comedy, audio drama, and narrative nonfiction. Smith is part of the Los Angeles live storytelling community, where she performs true stories from her own life. She is an Angelino who was raised in Middle America. This contrast of rural and urban, of culture and religion, informs her approach to storytelling.

Kevin Maurer has written eight books, all of them focused on the military in some way. His most recent book is “Rock Force: The American Paratroopers Who Took Back Corregidor and Exacted MacArthur’s Revenge on Japan.” The book was published by Dutton Caliber. In “Rock Force,” Maurer dives into one relatively small battle during World War II and shows us the men who were there. Maurer has frequently embedded with American soldiers. In 2003, he followed the 82nd Airborne Division during the initial invasion of Iraq and wrote articles for the Fayetteville Observer in North Carolina. He returned to cover the soldiers more than a dozen times, most recently in 2010, where he spent ten weeks with a Special Forces team in Afghanistan. In 2012, Maurer co-wrote, with a former Navy Seal, “No Easy Day: The First Hand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden.” That book was a New York Times best-seller.

Abbott Kahler is the author of four books of historical narrative nonfiction. More recently, though, she wrote the story “How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life.” It was published simultaneously by New York magazine and the Marshall Project. The piece is about how Gruen, the famed author of “Water for Elephants,” was left broke and seriously ill after fighting for six years to free an incarcerated man who she thought was innocent. Kahler and Gruen are close friends. Kahler says it was cathartic for Gruen to talk about what she had been through. The story got a lot of traction when it was published on March 24, giving more attention to the case of Charles Murdoch, the man Gruen is trying to free. This was definitely a different type of writing and reporting for Kahler. She’s made a name for herself as a New York Times best-selling author of historical narrative nonfiction. She’s done so under the name of Karen Abbott, although she legally changed her name in 2020, and will now write as Abbott Kahler. Her first book, “Sin in the Second City,” is about two sisters who ran a famous brothel in Chicago in the early 1900s. Her book “Liar Temptress Soldier Spy” is about four women who worked undercover during the Civil War. Her most recent book, “The Ghosts of Eden Park,” is about a bootleg king in Cincinnati and a shocking murder in 1927. It was an Edgar Award finalist for best fact crime book. Kahler has written for the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and other publications. She also maintains the Wicked History Blog, which presents old photos and short reported pieces that describe the photos.

Elon Green is the author of “Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York.” The book was published by Celadon Books earlier this month. The book is about men who were picked up in piano bars in New York City in the early 1990s, and then killed, dismembered and left outside the city. The book is about the lives those men led. Green did a massive amount of reporting in order to write this book. He gathered trial transcripts, massive amounts of police files, and documents handed over by friends and family members. He also interviewed about 160 people, some of them many times. Green has written for the New York Times Magazine, The Awl, and New York. He’s been anthologized in Unspeakable Acts, which was edited by Sarah Weinman. Green has also been an editor at Longform since 2011. In 2013 and 2014, he did Annotation interviews with some of the best literary journalists of all time, including reporters like Tom Wolfe, Mike Sager, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Gay Talese. He did those for Nieman Storyboard.

In this episode, Matt Tullis talks with Glenn Stout about his new book, “Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid: America’s Original Gangster Couple.” The book is about a husband and wife who robbed jewelers and bankers blind over the course of one year in the 1920s. It’s published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and is available on March 30. Stout has had an amazingly productive 2021. His book “Young Woman and the Sea” will be turned into a movie for Disney+. Production should be starting soon. The book is about Trudy Ederle, the first woman to swim the English channel. Ederle is going to be played by Daisy Ridley. She played Rey in the newest Star Wars movies. As if that’s not enough, Stout has also found a way to make sure the best sports writing in the country will continue to be anthologized. “Best American Sports Writing” had its 30th and final year of production in 2020. Stout had been the series editor for the entire time. He’s managed to create a new series called “The Year’s Best Sports Writing. It will be published by Triumph Books. Stout will edit the first edition, and he’s created an advisory board that will carry the book forward. That book will be available in October.

This episode features Mirin Fader, a new staff writer for The Ringer. Prior to joining The Ringer, Fader spent four years writing for Bleacher Report’s BR Mag. On January 14, The Ringer published her story “Davate Adams is Peaking in Every Way Possible.” The profile of the all-pro wide receiver for the Green Bay Packers was her first piece for The Ringer. The story goes deep behind the scenes of Adam’s life. That’s something that doesn’t happen often in profiles of star athletes. Fader spent a great deal of time talking with Adams, his wife, and his mother, and came away with a story that shows exactly how the wide receiver has been impacted by becoming a father. In Fader’s last year at Bleacher Report, she wrote two pieces about the heart-breaking deaths of two athletes. One of those stories was focused on Gigi Bryant, Kobe’s daughter, who died in the helicopter crash one year ago. The other story was about California Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2019. Fader said learned so much about empathy in reporting those pieces. Fader has been noted in Best American Sports Writing twice. She was also a finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal in 2020. She is currently writing a book about Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo. That book will be released in August 2021 by Hachette Books.

Andrea Pitzer is the author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. The book was published by Scribner, and went on sale on January 12. Icebound is a gripping piece of narrative journalism focused on European arctic explorers in the 16th century. At the center is William Barents, one of the greatest navigators of the time who's obsessive quest to sail through the most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both tragedy and glory. Pitzer did an amazing amount of research in order to tell this centuries-old tale. For Icebound, Pitzer made three trips to the Arctic herself. She spent a great deal of time in archives and libraries. She even walked through a replica of the yachts that sailed in the 16th century. Icebound is Pitzer’s third book. Her first book was The Secret History of Vladimir Nabobkov. After that, she wrote One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. In 2009, Pitzer founded Nieman Storyboard, the narrative nonfiction website for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She stayed on as the editor until 2012, but the site is still going strong. Pitzer has written for The Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, Outside Magazine, GQ, Longreads and others.

Bradford Pearson is the author of “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America.” The book was published by Atria Books of Simon and Schuster. Pearson’s book tells the story of Japanese internment camps during World War II, and a very special high school football team. That team offered hope to those who were being held in an internment camp on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming. Pearson spent a lot of time in historical archives to tell this story. It’s something he’s always enjoyed doing. He likes looking for a needle in a haystack, for a bit of information that ties everything together. He went to the National Archives, as well as archives in Wyoming and at UCLA. Pearson has been on the podcast before. He was on Episode 40 in November of 2015. At the time, he was an editor at Southwest: The Magazine. We talked about his story, “My Kidnappers,” which was published by Philadelphia Magazine. He has also written for the New York Times, Esquire, Time, and Salon, among other publications.

This is a rebroadcast of the November 2013 episode in which Matt Tullis talked with Jeanne Marie Laskas. They talked about her profile President-Elect Joe Biden, who was then serving as vice president. She spent a day with him being driven around his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. That story ran in GQ. Since joining the podcast, Laskas has written two books, bringing her total to eight. In 2015, “Concussion” was released. That book expanded her 2009 story “Game Brain,” which is also discussed in this show. The book was turned into a feature film starring Will Smith. In 2018, “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” was published. For this book, Laskas interviewed President Obama as well as the people who wrote him letters. She is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, a correspondent at GQ, and a two-time National Magazine Award finalist in feature writing.

This is a rebroadcast of the talk that Matt Tullis had with Mike Wilson in May 2015. Wilson was just named a deputy editor for enterprise in Sports at the New York Times. When we did this interview, Wilson had just been named editor of the Dallas Morning News. Wilson has a long track record of supporting journalists who write narratives. When he was at the Tampa Bay Times, he worked with a number of reporters who have been on this show: Ben Montgomery, Lane DeGregory, Michael Kruse, Kelley Benham French, Leonora LaPeter Anton, John Woodrow Cox, and more. They’re all excellent storytellers. That, in Wilson’s mind, is important, especially in news organizations. “Stories are how we understand the world, or how we share our experiences,” he said in the show. “They're how we communicate with loved ones. So it's very elemental stuff for human beings. So it's only natural that telling stories as journalists would also be really important.” When Wilson was a top editor at the Tampa Bay Times, the newspaper started publishing Encounters. The front page series consisted of short, interesting stories that one would not define traditionally as news. “It was supposed to be a really enjoyable five to six minute read for readers,” he said. “The Michael Kruse story about the guy teaching his daughter to ride a bike, there was absolutely nothing special about that story and then everything was special about it. It described this moment that probably just about every parent has been through of setting up your child on two wheels for the first time and letting go and watching them take those first few kind of halting pedaling steps forward and it was just this absolutely beautiful capturing of a universal moment."

Wright Thompson is a senior writer at ESPN, and the author of Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things that Last. That book just came out earlier this week. It’s published by Penguin Press. Pappyland had a strange route to publication. It was initially supposed to be a book Thompson ghost-wrote for Julian Van Winkle. Van Winkle is a bourbon genius who found a way to rebuild a business that was built by his grandfather and lost by his father. In the process, he’s created a bourbon that people pay more than $3,000 a bottle for. But ultimately, Thompson saw the book become something more, a book about a man who makes bourbon, and one who drinks it. The book is also about fatherhood. It’s about both Thompson’s father, who passed away several years ago, and Thompson, who in the book, is in the process of becoming a father. It’s almost magical that just five days before Pappyland was released, Thompson’s second daughter was born. Pappyland is actually Thompson’s second book. His first, The Cost of These Dreams, is an anthology of his best work from ESPN. He’s still writing longform narrative pieces for ESPN. He’s also producing the TV series True South, which focuses on southern food and culture. The show airs on the SEC Network. Thompson was a guest in the early days of the podcast. He was featured on Episode 11 in October 2013. At the time, we talked about his profiles of Michael Jordan and legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable.

John Woodrow Cox is an enterprise reporter for the Washington Post. He’s currently writing stories focused on how the COVID pandemic is impacting children. On October 7, the Post published his latest story, about the Marquez-Greene family in Connecticut. They lost their daughter Ana at Sandy Hook, and recently had to make a hard decision as to whether they would send their 16-year-old son Isaiah back to school in the middle of the pandemic. Cox was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2018 for his series of stories that look at gun violence and how it was impacting children. His book — Children Under Fire: An American Crisis — expands upon that coverage. That book will be available on March 30, 2021. Cox was on Gangrey: The Podcast way back on Episode 12 in October 2013. At the time, he was a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. In that episode, we talked about his series of stories for the Floridian titled “Dispatches from next door.” They included one about a woman who was only able to find peace on the ocean. We also talked about his coverage of cops, and one story in particular, about a 9-month-old who drowned in a family swimming pool. Cox said that story has had a lasting impact on him as a reporter. Since he was on the show, he’s won Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award for Human Interest Storytelling; the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma; and Columbia Journalism School’s Meyer “Mike” Berger Award for human-interest reporting.

Alex Belth is the curator of The Stacks Reader and the editor of Esquire Classic. He’s also the creator of Bronx Banter, a website that focuses on New York City sports, arts and culture and more. The Stacks Reader is a treasure trove of classic magazine journalism and other writing that otherwise might be lost to history. Belth has built this archive largely by himself, reaching out to writers and their families and obtaining the rights to republish. There are stories in The Stacks Reader that go all the way back to 1932, like Westbrook Pegler’s Chicago Tribune story headlined The Called Shot Heard Round the World. One of the writer’s whose work has been preserved on the site is a man named O’Connell Driscoll. Driscoll’s first magazine piece was a 13,000 word profile of Jerry Lewis. He wrote it for Playboy, while he was still in college. Belth recently received the 2020 Tony Salin Memorial Award from The Baseball Reliquary. He was honored for his work on The Stacks Reader and Esquire Classic, as well as his own baseball writing. He wrote Stepping Up, a biography of St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood. In 2012, he wrote the essay The Two Rogers for SB Nation Longform. That piece was about the death of Belth’s father, but also the writings of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell. Belth was included in Best American Sports Writing 2012 for his Deadspin story on sportswriter George Kimball. He often writes for Esquire.com.

Back in November, podcast host Matt Tullis talked with Chris Jones. Tullis wanted to talk with him about writing for a book he’s working on, a book focused on how to report and write narrative journalism. Tullis talked with Jones about writing for about 30 minutes. They talked about how Jones wrote “The Things That Carried Him,” which Jones won a National Magazine Award for in 2009. They talked about his Zanesville zoo story and his Roger Ebert profile and his Kenneth Feinberg profile. They also talked about Jones making the move to screenwriting. Jones made quite a career for himself at Esquire. He was regularly included in Best American Sports Writing for work he did for ESPN The Magazine. Now he’s a writer for the Netflix show Away. The show is loosely based on Jone’s Esquire story with the same title. That show will likely be released later this year. Jones was on the podcast back in January 2014. At the time, he talked about his Feinberg piece, as well as a story he wrote about what happened on Air Force One immediately after President John F. Kennedy was killed.

Kim Cross is a freelancer who writes for a number of publications. Most recently, Bicycling Magazine published her story “Noel and Leon: What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe.” The story is about two bicyclists who were riding in opposite directions on thousand-mile journeys. They just so happened to cross paths in the middle of a desert. Cross first heard about these two men five years ago, and fought long and hard to find a home for the story. This is the second time Cross has been on the podcast. She was on in September 2015, when we talked about her book What Stands in the Storm: A True Story of Love and Resilience in the Worst Superstorm in History. Cross has written for a number of publications, including ESPN, Outside, Bicycling Magazine, Garden and Gun, and more. She has been included in Best American Sports Writing twice, including in 2019, for her story "The Redemption of Artis Monroe."

Eva Holland is the author of the book “Nerve: Adventures in the Science of Fear.” Nerve is a hybrid of memoir and reported science. It’s focused on Holland encountering and overcoming the things she was most fearful of, and the science behind it all. The book came about after a few things happened back in 2015. First, Holland’s mom died unexpectedly. That was one of Holland’s greatest fears in life. And then, she was in a series of serious car crashes. “I rolled my car into a ditch in April 2016, and I had been thinking about the idea of a book about fear actually that day while I was driving on the highway,” Holland says. “That night in the hospital, I was like, yeah, okay, you’ve got to do the book about this now because obviously the universe is sending you some kind of sign.” This is Holland’s first book. Most of what she has done as a writer over the last decade are magazine pieces. She is a successful freelance writer, working as a correspondent for Outside magazine. She’s also written for Esquire, Wired, Bloomberg, Pacific Standard, AFAR, Smithsonian, and National Geographic News. This is Holland’s second visit to Gangrey: The Podcast. She was on the show back in March 2014. Nerve goes on sale on April 14.

How do some of the best narrative journalists find the stories they report and write about? This episode focuses on how four different reporters landed on stories that are still read and talked about today. In the first part, Luke Dittrich talks about how he ultimately decided to head to Joplin, Missouri, to report and write a story that won him a National Magazine Award. In Part II, Eli Saslow talks about how he landed himself in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, for the first piece in his Pulitzer Prize winning series on food stamps. In Part III, Pamela Colloff discusses the genesis of her National Magazine Award winning series The Innocent Man. Finally, Part IV is a snippet of a TedX Tampa talk that Michael Kruse gave, in which he discusses his story about Kathryn Norris, a woman who disappeared and was missing for 16 months, before someone found her body — in her own home. The first three parts all come from Gangrey: The Podcast archives. As usual, you can listen to every episode of the podcast, for free, on the website.

Bronwen Dickey is a contributing editor at The Oxford American and the author of Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon. In October 2019, her story “The Remains” was published by Esquire. The story looks at forensic anthropology, and one case in particular. “The story is about a young man named Christian Gonzalez, who came to this country when he was very, very young with his family, and grew up in East Texas and considered himself, as did his friends and family, to be American,” Dickey says. “And then he was deported after kind of a weird conflagration of events, and he was deported to Mexico. He really did not know his home at all and felt very lonely there. He tried to get back into the United States, and he died in the South Texas desert. Dickey opens The Remains with a scene that is very detailed, showing the forensic anthropologists doing their work on the remains of Christian Gonzalez. That work was done many years ago, though, which means Dickey had to recreate the scene through solid reporting. “Recreation is one of the parts of writing that I enjoy the most,” Dickey says, “Because it’s kind of like going on a historical scavenger hunt a little bit, trying to find the details that’ll fit into the puzzle of the picture you’re trying to build.” Dickey has written for Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, Pacific Standard, the New York Times, and so many more publications. She’s received the Hearst Editorial Excellence Award in reporting, and a Lowell Thomas Award in travel journalism. Her story “Climb Aboard, Ye Who Seek the Truth,” was published by Popular Mechanics, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Magazine Award in feature writing.

This episode features clips from four of the women included in the new anthology, “New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s New Generation of Great Women Journalists.” The book was recently published by The Sager Group. "New Stories We Tell" is the third in a series of anthologies celebrating women in longform journalism, featuring more than 50 great writers from the 1950s to the present. The first was “Newswomen: Twenty-Five Years of Front Page Journalism,” and was published in 2016. That book was followed two years later by “The Stories We Tell: Classic True Tales By America’s Greatest Women Journalists.” Four reporters who have been on the podcast are included in the new book: Pamela Colloff, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Janet Reitman, and Brooke Jarvis. Additionally, the book’s editors, Kaylen Ralph and Joanna Demkiewicz, have been guests on the podcast. They helped with “Newswomen,” and talked about that book in 2016. They are the editors of “New Stories We Tell.” In this episode, you’ll hear from them, as well as clips from Colloff, Grigoriadis, Reitman, and Jarvis. You’ll also hear from Mike Sager, the founder and publisher of The Sager Group.

This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Kelley Benham French in February 2013. They talked about her three-part series “Never Let Go,” which focused on the birth of her and Tom French’s daughter. Juniper was born at 23 weeks and 6 days, weighing just one pound-four ounces. The series was a hit. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. And it was expanded into a book, which French wrote with Tom. That book is titled “Juniper: The Girl Who Was Born Too Soon.” Kelley Benham French is currently a professor of practice at the University of Indiana. She recently reported and co-wrote a piece for the USA Today titled “The Long Road Home.” It was about a woman who believed she was a descendant of some of the first slaves in America, and who was trying to figure out who they were.

This is a rebroadcast of the original episode of Gangrey: The Podcast, featuring Justin Heckert. It originally aired in January 2013. Heckert talked with host Matt Tullis about his story “The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly,” which ran in The New York Times Magazine in November 2012. The story is about a 13-year-old girl who has a medical condition that makes it so she can’t feel pain. Since joining the podcast, Heckert has reported and written a lot of other amazing stories. His story, “Susan Cox is No Longer Here,” ran in Indianapolis Monthly, and was later republished by River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. It’s a haunting piece that looks at what happens when life, and death, don’t go the way we expect it to. In March 2014, he wrote a piece on Puddles the Clown for Grantland. In July 2018, he wrote about the last Blockbuster video store for The Ringer. And in August, he wrote about a year-long quest to save an injured loggerhead turtle. That story ran in Garden & Gun magazine. Tullis also interviewed Heckert a second time in 2015 when he did an annotation of his Men’s Journal story “Lost in the Waves” for Nieman Storyboard. Heckert has written for dozens of magazines, including Esquire, GQ, ESPN The Magazine, Men’s Journal, and Sports Illustrated. He has twice been named the City and Regional Magazine Association’s writer of the year.

This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Kim Cross in September 2015. Cross’s book “What Stands in the Storm: Three Days in the Worst Superstorm to Hit the South’s Tornado Alley” had been published by Atria Books in March of that year. The book is a reporting and writing masterpiece, as Cross went to great lengths to make sure the reporting was accurate, and the writing was compelling. Since joining the podcast, Cross been included in Best American Sports Writing twice. She was included in the 2016 edition for her story The King of Tides, which ran in Southwest: The Magazine. And this year, Cross will be in BASW 2019 for a story she wrote for Bicycling Magazine. That story is about a prisoner in California who spends his time restoring used bicycles. Cross has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Society of American Travel Writers. Her work has appeared in Outside, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Bike, Bicycling, Runner’s World, the Tampa Bay Times, ESPN.com, and many more publications.

This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did with Eli Saslow back in September 2014. Saslow, a reporter for the Washington Post, had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his six-part series on food stamps in a post-recession America. Tullis and Saslow talked about that series and much more. Since joining the podcast, Saslow has continued to write compelling stories that show the big issues facing our country in minute detail. He’s written about the opioid epidemic, how the made-up stories get passed around the Internet as news, immigration, and more. In June 2018, he wrote a story about the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who didn’t go into the school to engage the shooter. Saslow’s story about a white supremacist turning his back on the movement was ultimately expanded into a book. Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist was published by Penguin Random House in September 2018. The paperback version of that book will be on sale on September 3 of this year. Saslow has won more awards than I can list. He won the Pulitzer in 2014, and was a finalist for that award in 2013, 2016, and 2017.

On this episode, Rachel Monroe talks with host Matt Tullis. Monroe’s first book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime and Obsession, was published by Scribner. It went on sale today, August 19. The book tells the stories of four true crimes that had women intimately involved in them, but all in different capacities.  Monroe is a freelance writer based in Marfa, Texas. She also serves as a volunteer firefighter there. She’s written about crime, communes, utopias, drones, small town, firefighters, haunted houses, really just about everything.  She was a finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists in 2016 and was named one of 56 women journalists everyone should read by New York Magazine. She’s been published by The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, and Esquire, among many others. Her essay about murder, fandom, and adolescence, “Outside the Manson Pinkberry” was originally published in The Believer, and was anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2018.

On this episode, host Matt Tullis talked with Latria Graham, a writer, editor and cultural critic currently living in South Carolina. Graham’s writing revolves around the dynamics of race, gender norms, class, nerd culture, and sports. Back in 2016, she wrote one of the last pieces for SB Nation Longform. That piece was headlined “The Dark Knight Unmasked,” and was about the Carolina Panther’s Josh Norman. Graham has also written some important pieces about race for The Establishment, which is no longer publishing. Fortunately, they’ve kept their stories online. One of those pieces was an essay written by Graham titled “Why, As A Black Woman, I Finally Decided To Take To The Streets.” Graham’s first published piece ran on Ebony’s website. That was in May of 2013, and was about her struggles with bulimia. Graham has written for ESPNW, Outside Magazine, Bicycling Magazine, the Guardian, Our State Magazine, Garden & Gun, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and many other publications.

On this episode, I talk with Amos Barshad, the author of the book, “No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the World.” It was published by Abrams Press in April. The book looks at the people in the shadows of the powerful who silently pull strings and wield their own power. It’s incredibly interesting and entertaining, covering Rasputins in everything from pop culture to crime, from professional sports to politics. It also covers the namesake Rasputin – Grigori Raputin, an almost mythical Russian mystic who had the ear and the trust of Prince Yusupof, until Rasputin was murdered. Barshad was raised in Israel, the Netherlands and Massachusetts. He’s a former staff writer at The FADER and Grantland, and has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, and Arkansas Times.

This episode is a rebroadcast of the interview Matt Tullis did Wil S. Hylton in March of 2014. At the time, the two talked about Hylton’s new book, Vanished: The Sixty-Year Search for the Missing Men of World War II. The book focuses for the modern-day search for one American bomber that crashed over the Pacific Islands during the war. That bomber carried 11 men, who for decades, were listed as missing in action. When Hylton started the piece, he thought it was going to be a magazine piece. He had no idea it would expand into his first book. “I never really imagined that I would write a book to be honest,” Hylton says. “I venerate the magazine form. I always have. To me, it's the perfect gem-like distillation of a story, and it comes with all of its own special habits and history that are quite different from either doing fiction books or newspaper writing, broadly speaking. I just love it. This is the form that I've always wanted to work in, but what happened was this particular story forced me to try a new medium.” On May 8, Hylton had a new magazine piece published by The New York Times Magazine. It was headlined “My Cousin Was My Hero. Until the Day He Tried to Kill Me.” It’s a brutal yet important piece that looks at toxic masculinity and how it impacts all of us, and how it nearly ended Hylton’s life. Hylton opens up entirely about his own life in this piece, and it’s not always pretty. That’s what makes the essay so effective, and, hopefully, imactful. Hylton’s work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Rolling Stone, New York, and many other magazines. He has been selected for numerous anthologies, including The Best Music Writing, Best American Political Writing, Best Business Stories, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists.

On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Philip Gerard. Gerard, who is a professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, is the author of a new book about the Civil War. The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina was published in March by the University of North Carolina Press. The book is an extension of a series of nonfiction narratives that Gerard was writing for Our State magazine. Gerard was one of Tullis’s professors when he was in the MFA program at UNCW. Gerard is also the author of Cape Fear Rising, a novel that is set in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, a time when wealthy white residents massacred the growing and successful black culture in the city. That novel was originally published in 1994. Blair, the publisher, has reissued the book in a 25th anniversary edition, in part because so much of what is happening in the United States today mirrors Wilmington in 1898. Gerard has written five novels and eight books of nonfiction. He’s written books like Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life and Writing a Book That Makes a Difference. He’s written nonfiction narrative books like Secret Soldiers: The Story of World War II’s Heroic Army of Deception and The Patron Saint of Dreams. And he’s written fiction. In addition to Cape Fear Rising, Gerard has also written the novels Hatteras Light and Desert Kill, among others.

This episode focuses on Eli Saslow's story "Into the Lonely Quiet," which was about one Newtown family whose son was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. But instead of focusing on the reporting aspect of the story, as Gangrey episodes typically do, this episode is focused on the story's subjects and what it was like to open their lives up during a traumatic and horrific time in their lives. This is also the first episode of Gangrey: The Podcast that is told in story form, and not through straight interview. It's a complimentary audio piece tied to a written story that host Matt Tullis wrote for Nieman Storyboard. In this episode, Tullis talks with Mark Barden, the father of Sandy Hook victim Daniel Barden, Nicole Hockley, the mother of Sandy Hook victim Dylan Hockley, and Eli Saslow.

On this episode, I’m going to replay an interview I did Wright Thompson back in October of 2013. Thompson’s first book was just released by Penguin Books this week. It’s titled "The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business." It consists of 14 of Thompson’s previously published stories for ESPN. That includes the two stories that I talked with Wright about on this episode of the show – "Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building," and "The Losses of Dan Gable." Thompson’s profile on legendary wrestling coach Dan Gable is a perfect example of how and why reserved people open up to him. The Dan Gable story came up right on the heels of Thompson’s profile of NBA legend Michael Jordan. That’s the story that leads of the book. With the Jordan story, Wright said he kept thinking of the classic Esquire profile on Ted Williams, which was written by Richard Ben Cramer. That story was titled “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now.” “That story is very much a North Star, and the thing I’ve always wanted to do, always, is write that story,” Thompson says. “I knew going in that they’re only a couple of athletes famous enough to make that even possible.” The book is fantastic, of course. And it’s no surprise to me that after one week of sales, it’s already showing up at No. 4 on the New York Times Best Seller list for paperback nonfiction.

On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Carson Vaughan, the author of the “Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream,” which focuses on a small-town zoo in Royal, Nebraska, and its eventual downfall. Vaughan started reporting and writing this book as an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He then took the project to graduate school, where it was his master’s thesis in the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s MFA creative writing program. That’s the same program that Tullis graduated from in 2005. “Zoo Nebraska” was published by Little A, an imprint of Amazon Publishing that focuses on literary fiction and nonfiction. Vaughan is a freelance journalist who writes frequently about the Great Plains. He wrote “My Cousin, the Cowboy Poet” for the New Yorker. He’s also written for the New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review Daily, Outside, The Atlantic, Roads & Kingdoms, and Runner’s World, among others.

On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Michael Graff. Graff was the guest on Episode 35, back in June of 2015. At the time, he was the editor of Charlotte Magazine. He was also writing for places like SB Nation Longform. Now Graff is a freelance writer and editor. He recently published his first piece with ESPN.com, a story that focused on the life of former NBA legend Muggsy Bogues. That story, How Muggsy Bogues saved his brother’s life, and found the meaning of his own, explores the lives of two brothers, Muggsy, the superstar, and Chuckie, the older brother who spent many years battling drug addiction, but got clean once he started living with Muggsy. While Graff is still doing a lot of reporting, he’s also started writing, and publishing, some incredibly moving and beautiful essays, including ones about a high school friend whose daughter battled childhood cancer and another about what happened when he tried to cut negative people out of his life. Graff has written for ESPN, The Guardian, Garden & Gun, The Oxford American, Politico, SUCCESS, Washingtonian, Our State, and Southwest: The Magazine. He writes the monthly column for the back page of Charlotte magazine, where he was the editor from April 2013 to August 2017.

On this episode, we’re rebroadcasting an interview Matt Tullis did with Ben Montgomery, Thomas Lake, Michael Kruse, Wright Thompson, and Tony Rehagen, about the late, great Michael Brick. Brick died on February 8, 2016 after battling colon cancer. We’re approaching the third anniversary of Brick’s death, but his name and his amazing work lives on because a book of his stories — “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name” — was put together by the guests on this show and others, and then published by The Sager Group. The stories included in “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name” were originally published in The New York Times, the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, Harper’s Magazine, and others. Brick also wrote the book “Saving the School,” which was published by Penguin Press in 2012. Everyone Leaves Behind a Name is still available on The Sager Group’s website. It’s also available on Amazon.com. All proceeds from book sales go to Brick’s family.

On this episode, Matt Tullis talked with Sarah Weinman, the author of “The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World,” which was published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers in September. The book is a gripping true-crime investigation into the 1948 abduction of Sally Horner and how it inspired Vladimir Nabokov’s classic novel, “Lolita.” Weinman regularly writes pieces of true crime longform, having been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Guardian, and Buzzfeed, among others. She also covers book publishing for Publishers Marketplace. Weinman is the editor of the books “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Lives,” and of “Women Crime Writers: Eight suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s.”

On this episode, Matt Tullis talks with Brendan O’Meara. O’Meara is the host of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. On that show, he talks to writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters who he admires. They talk about the art and craft of telling true stories, unpacking their origin stories as well as tips and habits so that listeners can apply those tools in their own work. Tullis was a guest on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast back in September of 2017, when O’Meara talked with him about his memoir, Running With Ghosts. Recently, O’Meara hosted Glenn Stout, who talked about his new book, The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots, which was just released. O’Meara is also a reporter and a writer. In 2016, he published the story “The Day That Never Comes” in the online magazine Proximity. That story, which we talk about in this episode, ultimately won Proximity’s Narrative Journalism prize for the year it was published. He is also the author of Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year.

Ben Montgomery is the author of “The Man Who Walked Backward: An American Dreamer’s Search For Meaning in the Great Depression.” The book was published by Little, Brown Spark in September, and tells the story of a man named Plennie Wingo, who in 1931, attempted to walk around the world, backward. This is the third time Montgomery has been on the podcast. He was the guest on Episode 21, when he talked about his first book, “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.” That book went on to become a New York Times Bestseller. He was also one of five guests on Episode 45, which was focused on the work of the late Michael Brick, which was contained in the book, “Everyone Leaves Behind a Name.” The other guests on that show were Wright Thompson, Michael Kruse, Tony Rehagen, and Thomas Lake. Montgomery created the website gangrey.com, which was the namesake for this podcast. For years, he was one of the top enterprise reporters at the Tampa Bay Times, where he wrote about everything from the last spectacle lynching in Florida to why cops shoot at suspects. He left the Tampa Bay Times in October 2017 to focus on writing “The Man Who Walked Backward.” Now, he finds himself teaching student journalists at the University of Montana as the T. Anthony Pollner Distinguished Visiting Professor. Montgomery’s latest book is his third. His second book was titled The Leper Spy: The Story of an Unlikely Hero of World War II. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting in 2010 for his series of stories on the decades of abuse at a Florida reform school for boys. He won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for the same series.

On this episode, we’re rebroadcasting an interview that Matt Tullis did with Janet Reitman in October 2013. During this episode, Tullis and Reitman talked about her story, “Jahar’s World,” which ran in the Rolling Stone. The story was about Jahar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. Rolling Stone was criticized at the time because they put a glossy photo of Tsarnaev on the cover. But journalistically, the story that Reitman wrote was lauded as an excellent piece of reporting and writing. Reitman is being lauded again because of a piece she reported and wrote for the New York Times Magazine. The story, “U.S. Law Enforcement Failed to See the Threat of White Nationalism. Now They Don’t Know How to Stop It.” was published in early November. A few days after the story was published, Terry Gross interviewed Reitman for Fresh Air on National Public Radio. Reitman is a contributing writer for the New York Times, and a contributing editor for Rolling Stone. She is also the author of the book, “Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion.”

On this episode, host Matt Tullis talks with Brin-Jonathan Butler. Butler wrote the book, The Grandmaster: Magnus Carlsen and the Match that Made Chess Great Again, which will be released on November 6. The book takes a look at the 2016 World Chess Championship, which was held in New York City just before the 2016 election. It also dives deep into the type of personality needed to be a chess champion. Butler’s first book, The Domino Diaries: My Decade Boxing With Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway’s Ghost in the Last Days of Castro’s Cuba, was shortlisted for the PEN/ESPN Award for literary sports writing, and was a Boston Globe Best Book of 2015. His story, “Ghost of Capablanca,” published by Southwest: The Magazine, was included in the 2018 Best American Travel Writing. He’s also been a notable selection in that book, as well as Best American Sports Writing, multiple times. Butler has written for Esquire, Bloomberg, ESPN The Magazine, Playboy, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and Roads and Kingdoms.