Longform Longform

Meribah Knight is a reporter with Nashville Public Radio. She won the Polk Award for Podcasting for “The Kids of Rutherford County,” produced with ProPublica and Serial, which revealed a shocking approach to juvenile discipline in one Tennessee county.
“Where does it leave me? It leaves me with a searing anger that is going to propel me to the next thing. But we’ve made some real improvement. And that’s worth celebrating. That’s worth recognizing and saying, This work matters, people are paying attention.”
This is the third in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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Jesse Coburn is an investigative reporter at Streetsblog. He won the Polk Award for Local Reporting for "Ghost Tags," his series on the black market for temporary license plates.
“You can imagine this having never become a problem, because it’s so weird. What a weird scam. I’m going to print and sell tens of thousands of paper license plates. But someone figured it out. And then a lot more people followed. It just exploded.”
This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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Amel Guettatfi and Julia Steers won this year's George Polk Award for Television Reporting for “Inside Wagner,” their Vice News investigation of Russian mercenaries on the Ukraine front and in the Central African Republic. 
“One of the best takeaways I got from seven or eight years at Vice is that it’s not enough for something to be important when you’re figuring out how to make a story. It’s the intersection of important and interesting. And that has taught me that people will watch anything, anywhere, as long as it’s interesting. Nobody owes us their time. The onus is on us to explain things in an interesting, compelling way. I’m hoping that a landscape opens up somewhere else that sees that and understands that can be done anywhere in the world.”
This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.
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Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His novel, published in March 2024, is Great Expectations.
“I think the job is just paying a bunch of attention. If you're a person like me, where thoughts and worries are intruding on your consciousness all the time, it is a great relief to have something to just over-describe and over-pay-attention to—and kind of just give all of your latent, usually anxious attention to this one thing. That, to me, is a great joy.”
Show notes:

@vcunningham

vinson.nyc

Cunningham on Longform

Cunningham's New Yorker archive

04:00 "’The Suit’ at BAM" (Brooklyn Paper • Jan 2013)

04:00 "Label Maker: Edward Buchanan" (Nylon Guys • Mar 2015)

09:00 circlejerk.live


11:00 Jeremy O. Harris’ plays


11:00 "How Are Audiences Adapting to the Age of Virtual Theatre?" (New Yorker • Oct 2020)

18:00 "The Season of Russell Westbrook and a New Era in N.B.A. Fandom" (New Yorker • Apr 2017)

25:00 Cunningham's McSweeney’s archive


25:00 "The Flies in Kehinde Wiley’s Milk" (The Awl • Jun 2015)

25:00 "Can Black Art Ever Escape the Politics of Race?" (New York Times Magazine • Aug 2015)

25:00 "How Chris Jackson is Building a Black Literary Movement" (New York Times Magazine • Feb 2016)

27:00 "Stephon Marbury Has His Own Story to Tell" (New Yorker • Apr 2020)

28:00 "The Playful, Political Art of Sanford Biggers" (New Yorker • Jan 2018)

29:00 WTF with Marc Maron


32:00 "Tracy Morgan Turns the Drama of His Life into Comedy" (New Yorker • May 2019)

36:00 Redd Foxx party albums


38:00 Alexandra Schwartz’ New Yorker archive


41:00 Simon Parkin on Longform


41:00 Adrian Chen on Longform


42:00 "The Many Lives of Steven Yeun" (Jay Caspian Kang • New York Times Magazine • Feb 2021)


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Megan Kimble is the former executive editor of The Texas Observer and has written for The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and The Guardian. Her new book is City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways.
“I have never lived in a city that was not wrapped in highways. It’s hard for me to imagine anything else. And I think that’s true for a lot of people today. ... [But] we have known since the origins of the interstate highways program that building highways through cities doesn’t fix traffic. And yet we keep doing it. To me, that really fueled a lot of the book. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.”
Show notes:

@megankimble

megankimble.com

Kimble on Longform

Kimble’s Texas Observer archive

11:00 Kimble’s Austin Monthly archive


13:00 “Austin’s Not-So-Fair Housing Market” (Austin Monthly • Sept 2018)

49:00 “The Road Home” (Texas Observer • July 2021)


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Zach Harris is a journalist whose latest article for Rolling Stone is "Meet the Gen Z Hothead Burning Up Pro Bowling."
“I'm not like a staff writer who has … status and access. But if I come up with something fun that you've never heard of that might connect to the larger culture, then it kind of hits a nerve and a sweet spot for me. Someone like a pro skateboarder or a pro bowler, you guys have never heard of. And so being able to present a person and a culture and a world to a wider audience, I think suits me well and has been really a fun way to do profiles.”
Show notes:

00:00 "Meet the Gen Z Hothead Burning Up Pro Bowling" (Rolling Stone • Jan 2024)

01:00 "The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever" (Michael J. Mooney • D Magazine • Jan 2000)

02:00 Longform's bowling archive


13:00 Harris’s Vice archive


26:00 Thrasher Magazine


28:00 Harris’s High Times archive


29:00 amandachicagolewis.com


31:00 Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Malcolm Harris • Little, Brown and Company • 2023)

33:00 firstwefeast.com


36:00 "Pandora’s Bag: Rap Snacks Are Proof that Time Is a Flat Circle" (Vice • Jun 2012)


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