Earlier this year, during an appearance on Kareem Rahma’s popular Subway Takes show, Jasper Craven explained line-crossing ceremonies, in which sailors celebrate first crossings of the equator. In US naval history, line-crossing ceremonies have at times involved violent hazing. But they have also involved pageantry, ritualistic performances of masculinity and femininity that tip over into drag. “Young men want love, support, community,” Craven said. “The military provides a permission structure to show love, often in very pure ways.”
It’s a characteristic insight from Craven, a freelance reporter who has made a singular beat from the intersection of masculinity and the American military. In his magazine features, Craven has scrutinized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s opposition to women in the armed forces via Hegseth’s undergraduate fits over The Vagina Monologues, and profiled Bernarr McFadden, a bodybuilder and publisher who oversaw two military schools “to impose his love of physical strength onto American children, the War Department, and the world.” Craven’s recent book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, follows some of our most insidious models of masculinity back to the military education programs that have shaped them for centuries.
Craven is a dynamic counterexample to the men he writes about, less interested in bulking up the boundaries of his identity than testing their limits. For a memorable Harper’s feature, he spent six months undercover as an employee of the world’s largest private-security firm. (During his first shift, a supervisor criticized Craven for his non-detachable necktie, which could be used to strangle him.) He is at once stridently critical and deeply compassionate. (He is also, as you’ll learn, deeply and truly funny.)
“There are myriad other ways to prove your manhood, and they’re not simply being emotionally vulnerable or non-violent,” Craven told an interviewer earlier this year. “You can actually fight for things: fight for peace, be a little risky, be a little reckless, break the law, put your body on the line. If it’s around a morally sound mission, that can feel incredibly validating.” I don’t take a lot of heart from the men Craven writes about, but I take some heart from his work.
—Brendan Fitzgerald
Where did you grow up?
Peacham, Vermont.
What places feel like home?
The sluiceway at Gull Pond in Wellfleet, Massachusetts; Tom’s Diner in Brooklyn, New York; The St. Johnsbury Athenaeum in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
My folks, both filmmakers, shielded me from television and other mainstream entertainment as a child. Much as I resented their restrictions at the time, they forced me to troubleshoot my taste through the physical media available in our home, a beautiful process of discovery tinged by family lineage that I wish was still widely practiced. Nothing got me more excited than the films of Charlie Chaplin. I’ve consumed all his films, and The Great Dictator is my favorite. It is what much of my journalism aspires to be: narratively compelling, funny, and unflinching.
What is your favorite time of day?
I’ll take any time on the weekend. On workdays: I like the mornings for research and making calls, and evenings for writing. To me, the midafternoon is almost always a slog.
What are you really good at?
Guessing what time it is without a watch.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
I love Cold War ephemera. My two favorite gifts are a vintage poster of Dr. Strangelove and a Vietnam-era Snoopy Zippo.
Describe your favorite meal.
Negroni and a cheeseburger at Long Island Bar.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Sound. Ideally jazz or a film score. I wrote my book about military masculinity mostly to the work of Bill Evans, Pharaoh Sanders, and the soundtracks from Jackie, Do the Right Thing, One Battle After Another, and Ken Burns’s The Vietnam War.
Where do you do your best thinking?
On bike rides.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
Hauling a golden gorilla statute across America for a crypto concern during COVID.
Where do you like to read?
New York City’s Prospect Park, my clawfoot tub, the bed.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
Disney Adult YouTube vlogs. Still haven’t emerged.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
Probably my Harper’s dispatch on my six months undercover as a security guard.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Watching a movie or schvitzing at The Wall Street Bath & Spa.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Right now, Don DeLillo.
What words do you overuse?
Tenacious. Hyperaggressive. Amped.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
90 Day Fiancé.
What superpower would you like to have?
Like any good reporter, I’m very nosey, so probably superhuman eavesdropping. Lost about 20 percent of hearing in my right ear when a speaker blew out at a college party. Would love that back, and then some.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I’ve got the curiosity of a cat, but I often don’t land on my feet.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
I’ll either go on a bike ride or veg out on YouTube. The duality of man.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
A hanging chad ballot. The EV Hummer. Some Trump steaks. An AR-15. My medical bills after I fell off my bike.
What does your writing space look like?
I am someone who writes anywhere and everywhere. Amtrak. Delta. Starbucks. My bed. The Wertheim Room at the New York Public Library has been the best of them all.
Jasper Craven is a freelance reporter covering men and the military for outlets including Harper’s, The New Yorker, New York, Wired, The Baffler, and The New York Times. He’s also the author of a new book for Simon & Schuster about the military’s influence on masculinity, entitled God Forgives, Brothers Don’t.
Hundreds of newsletters land in my inbox each week. I use Gmail filters to route most of them into one big feed, and only a handful go into a separate folder for easier visibility. Erika Hayasaki’s The Reported Essay is one of them. In each edition, Hayasaki—a professor at the University of California, Irvine’sLiterary Journalism Program—writes about the craft of nonfiction and shares conversations with fellow journalists. She offers advice on the practice of reporting and storytelling and the business of freelancing, from balancing interiority and research to building a story’s structure to pitching stories.
Hayasaki is one of those writers whose new work I always make time to read. For Men’s Health, she told the intertwined stories of two men trying to understand and treat their long COVID symptoms. For The Cut, she wrote a memorable piece of romance and disaster about a Maui couple on the day Lahaina burned. For The Verge, she reported on an obsessive stalker who harassed Asian American professors online. Her narrative nonfiction illuminates the lives of individuals and communities, and the human connections within them. Her latest, for The Guardian, follows a New Jersey nurse assaulted by ICE, a woman she first wrote about in her bookThe Death Class. It’s yet another piece grounded in rigorous reporting.
After spending time with Hayasaki below, don’t forget to subscribe to The Reported Essay—it’s an indispensable resource for anyone who writes or reads the kind of nonfiction we recommend and celebrate at Longreads.
I was born in Champaign, Illinois, a college town surrounded by corn and soybean fields two hours south of Chicago. I lived there until I was 14, when my parents divorced and lost their home in a bankruptcy. I moved to Lynnwood, Washington, for high school, returning to Champaign for journalism school as an undergrad at the University of Illinois.
What places feel like home?
My current home in Southern California. I know it is my kids’ safe place. But I also think of my first childhood home, a one-story on Hathaway Drive in Champaign that my parents bought for $10,000 in the 1980s. When I am back in my hometown, I drive by it sometimes and glimpse the window I used to sneak out of, or the backyard jacuzzi deck that my dad built, or the strawberry patch where I winced eating unripened berries.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
I often wonder how the same hometown that crafted my identity, and deepened my own humanity, could turn around and strip someone else’s away. Obviously, I haven’t let go of this place that shaped me. So for the last several years, I have been reporting and writing a book, College Town, which is based in Champaign.
What is your favorite time of day?
Early morning writing time, 4:30 to 6:30 a.m, when the house is quiet and I am not checking messages or getting interrupted.
What are youreallygood at?
Connecting people to other people I think they might get along with, or appreciate, or learn from. Or connecting them to useful resources. I sometimes do mini one-on-one Zoom sessions with my Substack readers, and I like giving each person I meet their own individualized mini-syllabus at the end of it.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
The ability to communicate.
Describe your favorite meal.
Merkato Ethiopian food in Los Angeles: asa tibs (fried trout), injera, honey wine.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Silence during writing time. But I love the sound of laughter with family and friends—it is everything.
Where do you do your best thinking?
Long car rides (allowing the mind to rest and wander is key for creatives).
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
Right out of college, I was hired at the Los Angeles Times into METPRO (the Minority Editorial Program), which is now the Los Angeles Times Fellowship. Miriam Pawel, who just released a new book, California Dreams, was the Metro editor who hired me, and I was also mentored by people like Richard Kipling, Randy Hagihara, Steve Padilla, Richard E. Meyer (who wrote the piece I will never forget, linked below), as well as many other incredible writers and editors. The program also connected me to people who would become some of my best friends. This experience, in many ways, is why I also believe so deeply in the importance of being a mentor and connector.
Where do you like to read?
Home office.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
Every story I report leads to a rabbit hole, and that is part of the joy of reporting. Since the summer, I have disappeared into reporting rabbit holes about meditation scams, Accutane (the acne drug), Illinois history, abuse by ICE agents, international students, and the future of college.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Longreads, of course. Scratch, a newsletter of interviews, essays, and conversations about how writers are surviving. I also like catching up on long reads via Apple News audio during commutes and housework.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
“Julia Understands Everything,” by Richard E. Meyer, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. I often assign this story to students. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 1996. Reading it myself as a young journalist broke open what I realized is possible in nonfiction storytelling. Rick wrote about a woman paralyzed by a stroke that left her able to only communicate through eye and head movements. He spent nearly 450 hours interviewing her, as she raised her eyes while he pointed to letters of the alphabet on a card.
What was the last book you read?
California Dreams by Miriam Pawel, a fascinating historical portrait of the University of California told through a cast of compelling people. And The Black Shield by Wilbert L. Cooper, a feat of braided history, reported memoir, and narrative journalism that is engaging and nuanced.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
I recently came across a binder from high school with all of these articles and columns I wrote for my high school newspaper and for a teen newspaper run by The Seattle Times. These were earnest and idealistic pieces about discrimination, abuse, educational inequities. I look back at that kid trying to find her way in the world by asking questions and writing stories, and I’m just proud she kept going.
I see my undergrads doing the same—choosing to major in journalism in these difficult times because they care about what is happening in the world, and even in the age of AI they still yearn to think, question, and write—and that also makes me proud.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Sleep on it. Also talking to my writing friends. It’s important to have writing friends and if you don’t have any yet, make an effort to reach out to other writers and connect with them. Build a community (even if it’s intimidating).
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
“Bunch of Friends,” YouTubers—but only with my daughter.
What superpower would you like to have?
Healing.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I’m a people person, which is also why you will find people at the center of all my stories. I am most interested in the human condition. My house is filled with portraits and photos of people. We don’t have pets. This question was harder for me to answer, so I asked my kids. They gave these answers:
“Alicorn. Because you can do everything.”
“A dragon, according to Chinese mythology, because you are wise.”
“Eevee from Pokemon, because you have gone through multiple evolutions.”
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Lately, I am big on squeezing in a 20 to 30-minute midday nap.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
I really don’t get attached to stuff. Over the last few years, my 75-year-old mother got rid of all her stuff. She also gave up her home, and is now living full time out of her Toyota Sienna. Full-on van life. Yes, one day I will write an essay about this. She’s living her best life right now. I do have a lot of stuff, as you see in my office photo below. But I don’t attach much sentimental value to it.
I’m much more about the moments that I know will not last. For my first book, The Death Class, I followed a professor of death and dying, Norma Bowe (whom I also published a follow-up story on this week for The Guardian, after she was assaulted by ICE and filed a legal claim). Her class and teachings also helped me learn to value moments and human connections.
What does your writing space look like?
Erika Hayasaki is the author of The Death Classand Somewhere Sisters, which was named an NPR Best Book of the Year in 2022 and received a Nautilus Book Award in Journalism and Investigative Reporting. She is a professor in the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine, and a former national writer for the Los Angeles Times. As an independent journalist, her feature stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, National Geographic, and others. She recently received the Longform Narrative Award from the National Association of Science Writers, and her work is anthologized inThe Best American Science and Nature Writing 2025. Erika also served as chair of the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Nominating Jury in Feature Writing, and she publishes a Substack newsletter, The Reported Essay.
At first she told no one. Not her twin sister. Not her mother. Not even her father the scientist.
Six-year-old Jenna Smith knew better than to pee when she was in the bath. But on that night in 1992, in her family’s home in Iowa City, the water felt so comfortable against her skin that she didn’t want to get out of the tub. It seemed like such a small thing. Who would know?
Seconds later the water around her waist turned reddish pink. Blood? It had to be. Jenna wondered if she’d hurt herself. “I was six years old sitting in a bathtub, watching a few seconds of my world stop making sense,” she would recall years later.
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She kept the blood a secret because she didn’t want to admit that she’d peed in the bath. But when it was still in her urine the next time she used the toilet, she went to her mother. Concerned, her mom called her dad, Richard Smith, and he took Jenna to the emergency room.
Richard was an ear, nose, and throat doctor in the University of Iowa’s school of medicine, a researcher who would become one of the world’s authorities on the genetics of hearing loss. His wife, Lynne Lanning, had worked as both a lawyer and a nurse. They had four young children: twins Jenna and Jessica, who were identical, and two boys, Luke and Rion.
At the ER, doctors ran tests on Jenna, but they couldn’t identify the cause of the blood. In the days that followed the bleeding intensified. At her parents’ urging, Jenna collected samples of her urine in Dixie cups for further testing. The doctors remained stumped, however, and after a while Jenna found the whole thing more annoying than worrisome.
The uncertainty was much harder on her parents. It wasn’t that doctors were misdiagnosing their daughter; they were unable to diagnose her at all. “It was horrible,” Richard said. “Imagine seeing your child and you know something is wrong, and you know the doctors treating her have no clue what to do.” Richard called a pediatric nephrologist he knew in Houston, where the family had lived previously. The nephrologist listed several conditions that could be causing the bleeding and said that, to determine which was to blame, Jenna’s parents should take her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
In July 1992, Richard, Lynne, and Jenna drove nearly 500 miles to get answers. Doctors in Cincinnati diagnosed Jenna with dense deposit disease, a condition in which proteins clog and damage the kidneys, leading to renal failure in many patients. There was no cure.
The hospital couldn’t tell the family much else—no one could. The disease was exceedingly rare, afflicting between one and three people in a million. Back home, Richard and Lynne spent hours inside the University of Iowa’s quiet medical library, poring over papers in search of information about their daughter’s illness. They could find no evidence that anyone was actively studying the condition.
Although many Americans—roughly one in ten—suffer from a rare disease, the experience can be lonely. Friends and relatives don’t understand the unique miseries such illnesses impose on daily life. Few doctors are likely to have encountered them before. And because there aren’t many patients, drug companies usually don’t invest in research for treatments.
Richard and Lynne feared that their daughter’s life might be tragically brief. Sometimes the mention of weddings would sink Lynne into melancholy; she couldn’t bring herself to watch the movie Father of the Bride. Richard agonized over what to do. His training compelled him to seek answers, but he wanted to be Jenna’s father, not the scientist charged with curing her. He kept his research focused on hearing loss. At first, anyway.
Stories of scientific discovery almost always celebrate individual researchers, consigning the contributions of loved ones, communities, and colleagues to footnotes. There are exceptions―the teams that built the first atomic bomb and deciphered the human genome, for instance. Science also has its share of famous families. Marie and Pierre Curie, along with their daughter Irène and her husband, Frédéric, won five Nobel Prizes between them for discoveries related to radioactivity. For the most part, however, the history of scientific progress has been mythologized as a succession of brilliant, driven individuals—often men—who chose the lab over the dinner table and competition over collaboration.
Some scientists have embraced the role of maverick. “You have to worry about your own work and ignore what everyone else is doing,” the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is said to have told a colleague. The decades-long pursuit of a treatment for Jenna’s disease followed a very different path. There was no single hero, no lone scientist seeking glory. The biomedical quest required the efforts of a family and their neighbors in Iowa City, and the work of scientists around the globe. Together they changed an obscure area of medicine.
Richard and Lynne met in 1977, when both were working at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston—she as a nurse, he as a medical intern. He noticed a run in her nylons and was smitten by her smile. She liked his down-to-earth manner and intelligence, his humor and kindness. They were working in the hospital’s burn unit when he asked her out.
The couple married in 1981, and except for two years in England, they remained in Houston until 1990. That December they moved to Iowa City, where Richard had a job waiting for him leading the pediatric otolaryngology division and running a research lab at the University of Iowa’s medical school. They had been there only a year when Jenna got sick.
Richard and Lynne learned that their daughter’s disease was caused by a malfunction in her complement system. Believed to have evolved long before other parts of our immune infrastructure, the complement system sends proteins to battle foreign invaders. Unlike antibodies, these proteins are not tailored to fight a specific virus or bacteria, but they kick into gear faster when a threat is detected. In people with Jenna’s condition, the complement system is like a runaway train: Proteins become overstimulated and then accumulate in the glomeruli, tiny filters the kidneys use to clear waste from blood.
Blood in the urine is one symptom of the disease. Others include swelling, high blood pressure, inflammation, and fatigue. When Jenna was in the first grade, her body struggled to make growth hormones. Her production of red blood cells slowed, and she grew increasingly tired. During rehearsals for The Nutcracker ballet around Christmas 1993, she’d finish her part and then lie down backstage, completely spent.
Doctors put her on a heavy dose of the steroid prednisone and on blood-pressure medication. The prednisone caused her body to retain water. She woke up each morning with her eyes swollen shut, then waited in bed until the swelling receded. She couldn’t fit into her clothes or shoes. She wore flip-flops and roomy jumpers Lynne sewed for her.
As twins, Jenna and Jessica had always been close. They played together, made up songs and dance moves, explored the woods near their home, and enjoyed pranking friends and family members. “She made a lot of things feel not so heavy,” Jenna said of her sister. Still, she sometimes thought that Jessica “got off scot-free” by not having dense deposit disease. Neither girl liked feeling different from the other. (Years later, Jessica would be diagnosed with type-1 diabetes; Jenna would not.)
The changes to Jenna’s appearance meant the girls were no longer identical. Once, according to Lynne, when a boy at school said that Jenna couldn’t be a twin anymore because of how she looked, Jessica slugged him. Lynne recalled sitting in the principal’s office, politely listening to a lecture—this is not the way we resolve things!—but understanding why Jessica had lashed out. Nothing was so frightening to her daughters as the idea that they’d stop being twins.
About half of those afflicted with Jenna’s disease progressed to kidney failure within a decade of diagnosis; it took her less than a year. She made it through the last day of first grade. Then, as other children departed for summer camp, she went to a clinic. While her classmates practiced archery and did arts and crafts, she learned about the catheter doctors would surgically insert in her body. Through that tube, a machine would pump fluid into her abdomen, where her peritoneum—her abdominal lining—would take over the filtering function kidneys usually perform.
She would take the peritoneal dialysis machine home with her and use it every day for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of her life. When a nurse tried to take Lynne aside to show her how to operate it, Jenna stopped her. “I’m the patient,” the seven-year-old insisted. “I’m learning how to run the machine.”
In such moments, Lynne was surprised at the strength she drew from her daughter. She needed it. Her grief could leave her feeling drained. One day she found herself crying into the soil as she gardened.
But Lynne and Richard were determined that sadness would not define their lives. For a long time, they didn’t have a TV in their house—they wanted the family to talk when they were together, and for the children to build forts, learn to sew, be creative. They had painting nights, creating portraits of one another. There were cooking contests, too. Richard and Lynne made sure to spend one-on-one time with each kid. Richard traveled with Luke to Japan, with Rion to the Grand Canyon, with Jessica to Italy, and with Jenna to England. Lynne took trips with the children to Brazil, England, and Guatemala. There were themed birthday celebrations: a James Bond party for Richard, where everyone was armed with Nerf guns, and one for Lynne where Richard dressed as the artist Bob Ross and the guests painted “happy little clouds.” Richard coached the kids’ hockey and soccer teams. He built harps and lyres from scratch, and Lynne played them.
Every day, Richard left for work at 5 a.m., while the children were still in bed. He returned around six at night. The family joked that they could hear him coming from half a mile away in his rust-bucket Isuzu Trooper with the bad muffler and a hole in the passenger footwell. When he wasn’t seeing patients or in surgery, Richard was in the lab. On Saturdays, Luke would go there with him. Sometimes the other kids joined. They liked to refill the communal candy jars and visit the mice used in experiments.
It seemed a wonder to the lab’s staff that Richard squeezed so much into a day. When they began using email to communicate, they received messages from him time-stamped three or four in the morning. “Why don’t you sleep sometime?” a colleague replied once. Indeed, Richard slept little. At night his mind kept running through the mysteries of his daughter’s disease.
Richard had read that it took 10,000 hours—the equivalent of working full-time for about five years—to achieve expertise in a subject. He believed it. In 1995, he began flying to conferences about kidney disease, where he talked to the few doctors who cared for patients like Jenna. Medicine was getting no closer to finding a treatment.
That year the owner of a ranch where Richard and Lynne’s children took riding lessons offered to host a fundraiser for kidney disease research. The family organized Dressage in the Heartland, which featured riding events, fiddle music, and bowls of chili. After raising upwards of $10,000 for the National Kidney Foundation, they held the event again the following year. There are hundreds of kidney ailments, however, and the foundation didn’t allow the money the family raised to be earmarked for the research of dense deposit disease. (The foundation said it now allows monetary gifts to be dedicated to specific conditions.)
Richard and Lynne ran into more disappointment during a visit to the University of Minnesota in early 1997. A specialist they consulted was blunt. “Nobody is looking at this disease,” he told them. “And barring something unforeseen, nothing will be done in the next twenty years.”
It was a four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Iowa City. In the car, Lynne brought up what the doctor had said. Maybe they would have to be that unforeseen something.
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Earl Swift was a reporter for The Virginia Pilot and has contributed to Outside. He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer eight times. Among other books, he wrote Chesapeake Requiem, a New York Times bestseller that chronicles a year in the life of Tangier Island, located 12 miles out in the middle of Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay. There, a dozen miles from shore, residents live a life with “one foot in the twenty-first century and another in times long passed,” he writes.
This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow.
—Krista Stevens
Brendan: Much has been written about the Appalachian Trail, and you’ve brought a different kind of sensibility to it. How do you make your book fresh and immediate and yet able to sit alongside all the other titles about the trail?
Earl: I’m lucky, in the sense that probably the two best books about trail hikes were written by people who didn’t finish them. Bill Bryson was one and Cheryl Strayed was the other. Most trail accounts are self-published and unedited, written by folks with relatively little writing experience. Not to sound highfalutin, but it shows. I also knew I had a story to tell with Molly and Jeff and what had happened there. [Ed: to say more about Molly and Jeff here would spoil the plot of Swift’s book.] I felt I was pretty well-suited to tell that story. The opportunity was to be that one rare book about a trail journey that stands apart, and I figured it was worth the risk to try to write that book.
Brendan: As you hiked south, getting into Georgia, you started to experience congestion, more people. You noticed a generational divide at Low Gap and other campsites. Younger hikers seem predisposed to tenting, no matter what. Even in the middle of a downpour, they’ll choose their individual shelter over the communal. You also noticed isolation and phones, something you wouldn’t see 30 years ago.
Earl: You didn’t see it 30 years ago because there were no phones. We forget that the smartphone didn’t come along until 2007, a full 17 years after I did that first hike. It was a very different environment back then. This was eight years before Bill Bryson wrote A Walk in the Woods. The trail did not occupy a spot in the collective consciousness. It was not part of American culture the way it has become since, and so you were dealing with people who were drawn from a much narrower band of society. There were people who were already outdoorsy, and that’s not necessarily the case now. All walks [of life] attempt a thru hike these days, but back then it tended to be people who were already part of the fraternity. If you wanted to make a call, you hitchhiked to the nearest town and went to a payphone. There was no other option. If you wanted a pizza, you had to hitch into town. Now you have people who will get on their phones when they’re two miles from the nearest road crossing, and they’ll arrange for a pizza joint to deliver a pie at the road crossing when they arrive, which would have been science fiction.
Brendan: There’s a balance in what to include, so that it doesn’t feel repetitive. You need to pick high intensity moments, be it the physical experience of a gnarly section of trail, or the three siblings from Kentucky who are assholes with no etiquette. You pick these moments so it’s not front-loaded or middle-loaded or back-loaded. There is a delicacy in how you deploy various elements throughout.
Earl: For any storyteller, proportionality is the key ingredient. You must figure out how much of each piece you share with the reader. If there’s one fatal flaw in most trail chronicles, it’s that writers don’t make enough of a distinction between telling moments and untelling moments. They just throw everything at you, and it gets boring.
There are relatively few classic books about the Appalachian Trail, but one of them came in the late ’70s. It’s this two-volume, 1,000-page book called Hiking the Appalachian Trail. It gives you first-person accounts of the first 50 or so thru hikes. By 100 pages into the first volume, you’ve gone numb because every story is exactly the same. Part of the problem is that the whole tenor of the story is This happened, and then this happened. There’s never a moment’s pause to reflect on what it means and why I should care as a reader. Everything’s treated as equally important, and therefore nothing is important.
Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story.
Brendan: You’re the tour guide and you’re going to point to what matters. That degree of authorial authority is integral to any narrative, especially something like this, because otherwise it would just be so rote and boring. You have to imbue it with a pulse.
Earl: Job one, for anybody writing a book—for anybody writing a story of any kind, of any length—is to get the reader to that last word. If you don’t do that, it doesn’t matter which pretty words you drop in the middle of the story. It doesn’t matter how brilliantly conceived it is. The story has failed because you have failed to get the reader to the end, to the finish line.
The whole process of structuring a story, and strategizing about a story comes down to, How do I remove all the speed bumps that will encourage the reader to set this aside? If you can do that effectively, then you win, you get the reader to finish the story. The reader can badmouth the story after the fact. If the reader’s reached the end, you as the writer have achieved what you set out to do. All you can ask is for them to finish the story. You can’t ask them to like it. That’s up to them. But you can get them to finish it if you do it right.
We make decisions about what we include and what we leave out. We decide where we start a story, which is not always at the beginning. We decide where we’re going to end it, which is not always at the ending. You hope that in making those decisions, you get the reader to the truth, or pretty damn close to it, as close as you can, given the facts that you’re working with. But it is a construct, and it is your responsibility. Structure your story in such a way that the story will achieve what it sets out to do. That it will succeed in terms of incorporating enough propulsion to get the reader to the end.
I probably spent three months doing nothing but cutting. Most of the writing of this book was cutting. I wrote a journal while I was hiking, and then I did nothing but cut when it came to writing the book.
Brendan: In what ways did the hike change you?
Earl: In 1990, the big takeaway for me was that I could do anything. It boosted my confidence to the point where I’m sure I was pretty obnoxious in the months immediately after. God knows I must have been difficult to deal with. I could do anything! It made me Superman. Part of that was seeing something demonstrated daily that my dad had been saying to me for years. He was always big on saying, “How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time.” It had just been “dad talk” to me until this hike, when I realized part of being able to do anything is knowing how to bust it up into its components, and then bust those components up into their individual ingredients. How to take each little bite-sized fragment in sequence, and pretty soon you’ve accomplished the whole thing.
That dictated my approach to big assignments at the paper and in magazines, and certainly it has informed every book effort. It’s a stupid amount of work to write a book. I wouldn’t recommend this line of work to anybody. It’s a ridiculous way to try to make a living. So uncertain, so filled with terror, and so potentially without reward of any kind. But breaking the 2,200 miles into daily doses of 14 to 17 miles describes perfectly how I go about writing a book now. You don’t sit down to write 105,000 words. You sit down to write 1,200 words a day. That’s my daily quota. Do that over enough days, and pretty soon you have the 105,000 words.
Brendan: How did you settle on 1,200?
Earl: Early on, with my first couple of books, it was 2,000, and I just whacked it down. My first hike, I had no trouble banging out 17 to 20 miles a day. Now, 14 miles feels like a pretty tough day at the office, a long day.
It’s the same with writing. Twelve hundred words takes as much out of me now as 2,000 used to. I’ll probably drop it down to 1,100, maybe even 1,000 with the next book. I’d like to think that the words are better than they used to be. I still find that I spend the first hour or two every morning, in the middle of a book project, going back through what I thought were perfect words laid down the day before. Invariably, when I wake up, I find that they weren’t so perfect after all. In fact, they need a lot of fixing and so I do repair for the first couple of hours, and then try to make something out of the rest of the day with new stuff.
Four years ago, I read Roberto José Andrade Franco’s ESPN story about Tess Mata, one of the students killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, and I’ve never forgotten an image in it: a determined Tess outside in the Texas heat, aiming her softball pitches at a target on a tree in her family’s yard. That’s what Franco does so well. He creates moments that linger—about sports, Texas, loss, and identity and in-betweenness—and makes me care about the people he puts on the page.
Franco grew up on the El Paso-Juárez border. In a 2020 National Magazine Award-nominated essay that he wrote one year after the El Paso massacre, he reflects on the lifelong pull to this paradox of a place: “It’s where things make the most sense. Where it’s easy to love, even if it’s difficult to live.” I love that he writes from this borderland even when he’s somewhere else. During Mexico’s first World Cup match earlier this summer, he was in Woodburn, Oregon, a small town where Latinos make up more than 60 percent of the population and own nearly every business downtown. Residents had been shaken by last fall’s ICE raids, but they showed up to watch and celebrate. There, thousands of miles from El Paso, Franco found something familiar: a hardworking, resilient community with deep Latino roots and a fierce sense of pride.
I also credit Franco with piquing my interest in wrestling stories, including his piece on WWW star Eddie Guerrero, which also explores family and legacy. Whether he’s writing about sports heroes or ordinary people, or tracing the history of Texas or his own, Franco never fails to move me.
Below, he explains why enrolling in community college at 28 was the most meaningful journey he’s taken, tells us his favorite meal (and the ideal season to eat it), and recognizes a fellow sports writer who inspires him. When asked to name three publications he enjoys reading, he gives a shout-out to Texas Highways, a magazine we love—and it just so happens that he’s the guest editor of its October 2026 issue, focused on El Paso. After spending time with Franco here, read his feature on the city’s historic Smelter Cemetery, and then explore the rest of the magazine.
Several places, but mostly on the El Paso-Juárez border.
I was born in Chicago, but we lived in Juárez, Mexico, until I was about 6. Then we moved across the border to El Paso, Texas, before my father joined the Army. That’s when we lived in Chicago for a short time, then Colorado and Germany before we briefly returned to Juárez. I was about 13 when we moved to El Paso again.
What places feel like home?
Anywhere I hear the Spanish of the US-Mexico border. These areas are often ignored and underserved so it’s a working-class Spanish. Because of its location, some words are a mix of English and Spanish that other parts of Mexico don’t use.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
The decade between graduating high school and enrolling at El Paso Community College. I spent most of it working in construction and bouncing around between El Paso and Phoenix, along with a few bad months in Tucson.
What is your favorite time of day?
The early morning when everyone is asleep and the sun’s yet to rise. And it’s so quiet that, almost always at the exact same time, I can hear my neighbor’s footsteps as they walk out of their home, open and close their car door, start it, and then drive away, presumably on their way to work.
What are you really good at?
Building things. I find it almost therapeutic to do some sort of work with my hands as I sweat and listen to music. I also enjoy the feeling of seeing something finished within a few hours.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
I don’t remember who I got the idea from, but years ago I heard or read a suggestion to interview your children during different phases of their lives. Just take out the voice recorder and ask them basic questions. When they’re younger, you can ask about their favorite animal, color, movie, etc. As they get older, the questions can be more about their friends, hobbies, and aspirations.
I’ve been doing this every few months with my now 9-year-old daughter. Occasionally, I’ll listen to the first recordings from when she was 3, and I can hear how much she’s changed—from her voice and interests to the clarity of her words and thoughts. It’s like a short visit with a different version of who your child once was.
That suggestion to interview your children has been the best gift.
Describe your favorite meal.
My mom’s pozole. It’s a Mexican pork and hominy stew accompanied with radishes, cabbage, and bolillo bread. She’ll sometimes make it in late October, on the Saturday closest to my birthday. The weather will be colder by then and a college football game will be on in the background—both of those make it even better. Then a good cigar afterwards.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
It’s become silence. I used to write with music in the background. It almost didn’t matter what kind, and sometimes it’d be the same song on repeat for hours. That was also when I’d do most of my writing during the day and into the early evening. But now, I’ve fallen into a routine where I do most of my writing early. Sometimes I’ll wake up naturally as early as three in the morning. With that change, I now write in silence.
But maybe it’ll change back to music one day.
Where do you do your best thinking?
It just happens so there’s no specific place. And so long as I’m not on deadline, whenever I feel like I can’t think anymore I just try to do something else for that day.
I’ve gotten ideas while driving, listening to podcasts and music, or in the middle of watching a movie. I’ve even woken up during the middle of night with a thought that helps unlock something that I had been stuck on.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
Earning an associate degree.
I was a nontraditional student who first enrolled at El Paso Community College at 28 years old. It had been about a decade since I was in school. I was full of self-doubt and worry that I was too old or not a good enough student to be there. With that, I also worried that I might be wasting my time.
But I quickly realized I was a much better student in college than I’d ever been in high school. I was motivated, disciplined, and having worked in construction for the decade before then, I had a different perspective of what college could be. Whenever I felt like complaining, I’d remind myself (as I’ll still occasionally do) that reading and writing is a lot easier than doing manual labor outdoors, especially during the summers.
I ultimately transferred and graduated from a four-year university, and later even finished a PhD program. But that associate degree was the most meaningful because it’s where I started to find outlets for my intellectual curiosities and people who encouraged me.
Where do you like to read?
I don’t have any specific place. At home it’s usually in my office, bed, or on the couch. Away from there, I’ll read while waiting. I’m an anxious flyer, so I’ve also recently found myself saving longer reads for when I’m at the airport or on a plane. It lets me focus on something else while also helping pass the time.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
The World Cup.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Texas Highways to read about the parts of Texas that aren’t chaotic or depressive. De Los to keep up with some of what’s happening with Latinos outside of where I live. The Good Fight to stay current with boxing.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
Michael Paterniti’s “The House that Thurman Munson Built.” It’s got everything that interests me as a reader and writer: tragedy, memory, and examining what athletes mean to us at different ages.
What was the last book you read?
Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye. It’s an excellent book.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Go for a walk or drive. Either of those help me get away from what I’m doing without completely separating me from it.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Wright Thompson, who I’m fortunate to call a colleague.
I’ll sometimes listen to a chapter or two from The Cost of These Dreams on audiobook before I start writing a story. Wright is among the best sports writers ever, but the story of his that I’ll most often return to is the one he wrote for The Atlantic, “His Name Was Emmett Till.” The small part where one of the main characters says he doesn’t think of the past but has a dog named Dixie is perfect.
And in first drafts, I start too many sentences with “so,” “because,” and “since.”
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
Watching mindless, and at times dumb, dating shows with my wife.
What superpower would you like to have?
The ability to not get distracted by my phone.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
Stray dogs who largely mind their own business and hang out in the same general area without terrorizing it.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
If it’s early in the day, I’ll take a nap.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
My phone full of photos and videos, a drawing from my daughter, my box full of sports cards, my voice recorder, and a Dallas Cowboys Super Bowl XXX champions hat because I increasingly fear that’ll be the last one they’ll win.
What does your writing space look like?
I’ve turned a room in our house into my office. It has a wall-to-wall bookcase. On the opposite side of it is my desk. It has plenty of space, a filing cabinet attached to it, and a shelf for my speaker and printer. Yes, a printer. It’s nothing fancy, but practical.
On the wall above the desk is a dry-erase board where I’ll write reminders and a few words that are story ideas. Once those ideas become a story, I have a corkboard, on the wall to the left of where I sit, for the three-by-five cards I use to outline and organize sections. Above the corkboard are reminders of what I need to focus on when I write. Below it is a calendar for deadlines and travel dates. To the right of where I sit is a small couch. The walls have framed boxing fight posters, work of local artists, photos of my wife and daughter, and random things that mean something to me, like mini football helmets from the University of Texas-El Paso.
Roberto José Andrade Franco is a feature writer with ESPN and aWriter-at-Large with Texas Highways. His work has been anthologized four times in The Year’s Best Sports Writing and nominated for the National Magazine Award. He’s also a four-time finalist for the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.
Watching The Jetsons as a kid in the ’80s, I was obsessed with the food machine, and how it dispensed a full meal at the touch of a button. The show was set in 2062, exactly a hundred years on from its original broadcast. We’ve made it to 2026, but life today resembles nothing like that slick space-age future. We have gadgets, but they’ve arrived as phones, apps, and smart home devices—and I’m not sure they’ve made my life better.
“Accepting modern conveniences too often means accepting lower standards,” writes Gabe Bullard in Against Convenience: Embracing Friction in an Age of Endless Ease. Lower standards for material goods, for labor conditions, for socializing, for art and entertainment. “Experiences become transactions.”Bullard isn’t anti-technology. His argument, he writes, “is an argument against how we use and are pushed to use technology.” In his new book, he examines the conveniences that have crept into his life—and likely yours—and offers ideas for living with them more sustainably and equitably.
In this excerpt from chapter seven, Bullard sets this scene: a physical world, the one we’ve moved through for centuries, slowly reshaped by the virtual one we increasingly live in. Cars drive from one dot on a map to another, ferrying takeout to people at home on sofas. Food deliverers make some extra money. Businesses take orders both online and off. It appears easier, efficient. But Bullard examinesthe costs—to the customer, to the driver, and to the restaurant owner, who still has to make sure the fries are crispy once they reach your door.
The artist Jake Longstreth paints landscapes of America, often the West and Southwest, with their distinctive vegetation, deserts, and mountains. In the foreground of many of his paintings are features that evoke a time more than a single place—CubeSmart self-storage, Taco Bell, a sun-bleached facade with shadows where the words Toys ‘R’ Us once hung.
In one series, each painting is a different view from the parking lot of a Walmart in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ferns, trees, and desert grasses obscure the sharp edges of the boxy store. Semitrailers and loading docks peek from behind the brush. In a painting from a different series, a Home Depot abuts a Civil War battlefield.
The work has a loneliness that’s reminiscent of Edward Hopper’s paintings. But unlike Hopper, Longstreth rarely paints people (one exception is a group of soldiers in uniform at the grand opening of a Chili’s). The only signs of humanity are occasional cars and the chains that “make up, basically, an American commons,” as Longstreth described them in an interview promoting an exhibition of his work in 2024. “Most people don’t really have a super-deliberate relationship with these places,” he added.
There’s a certain democracy to the scenes: Anyone, anywhere can eat the same value meal as anyone else. There’s also an intrusion: The chains’ architecture imposes a sameness on once-unique landscapes. The stores and restaurants are dropped into spaces that weren’t made for them. Flat, square plots are pressed into hills, ample parking provided.
The encroachment of a drive-thru on a lush California valley is a good representation of many modern conveniences. The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them. The systems absorb the change, but they do it awkwardly and end up forever altered. Starbucks becomes a place to pick up app orders; appliances become accessories to connect to your phone; QR codes sit on restaurant tables; analysis replaces news; art becomes Content; machines replace people.
Uncomfortable intrusions and uneven responses are everywhere.
Examples abound: Grocery delivery apps bring an old idea to a new reality. Grocers offered delivery over a century ago, but the stores were set up and staffed for this. Modern grocery stores are built for customers to come in and do their own shopping. Delivery apps now let customers pay someone to do the same physical task the user would do if they went to the store themselves. What seems like a simple process can quickly become inconvenient. Grocery stores evolved to let customers pick out their own fruit, check dates on packages, and otherwise get things for themselves based on what looked good (or what the store suggested they buy). Virtual shoppers do this picking for customers, sometimes in a hurry so they can fulfill more orders. Mistakes can happen even under the best circumstances. Better deals go ignored. There’s confusion when an item is out of stock and the customer hasn’t chosen an alternative. It can lead to a customer essentially steering a shopper through the store on their behalf.
Rentable electric scooters have become a fixture of urban sidewalks in the past decade. The scooters speed up trips that are too far to walk, too short for a car ride, and not covered by public transit. But these are more of a tacked-on convenience than a real solution. City streets aren’t often built to accommodate smaller vehicles, leaving scooter riders to either use car lanes (putting the rider at risk) or sidewalks (putting pedestrians at risk). Poorly parked scooters clutter neighborhoods. And the environmental benefits are questionable, if at times nonexistent: Broken scooters need to be replaced and vans typically pick up scooters for charging. These problems could be solved through a more active response from cities—more adequate public transit, sustainability requirements for the rental companies, limits on where scooters can be ridden and parked. Cities could build better infrastructure, too, to favor bikes, scooters, and pedestrians over cars.
The postal system and most homes were built to accommodate the delivery of mail and packages. But the scale of e-commerce deliveries has forced inconvenient adjustments to physical and social spaces. In the years I lived in a large apartment building, package drop-off was a constant frustration. Every afternoon, the lobby filled with Amazon and Chewy boxes. They sometimes sat there for days (rush delivery wasn’t essential after all). What was built as a place for neighbors to mingle became a warehouse for boxes of dog food where people occasionally waited for rideshares.
For private homes, the doorbell camera offers convenient, instant notification that a package has arrived and security footage if the package is stolen. It’s an inelegant, antisocial solution. The old-style doorbell was already a notification a package had arrived. The new gadget moved the chime and the peephole to the pocket (and gave users another reason to stay glued to their phones). Package theft is a crime of convenience created by constant online shopping and delivery, and it’s not clear the cameras are stopping it. In my old neighborhood, people often posted grainy images of package thieves to local message boards. Sometimes the person said they were giving the information to the police, as if the police would bother tracking down whoever took a box that had most likely already been replaced. Perhaps the footage will go into a database to be scanned by facial recognition software instead. Doorbell cameras might be meant to catch crimes, but more often, they create Content like the videos of accidents I scroll past online. Everyone is eager to share their personal view of the panopticon.
Is the convenience worth the cost of constant surveillance and suspicion of every person who steps on your stoop (not to mention a subscription to the software that runs the camera)? Even if the cameras prevent a package theft, it’s unlikely the increased surveillance is a deterrent for violent crimes, or that it has an effect on overall neighborhood safety. That would take a collective solution. The camera lets the homeowner feel optimized to take on (or hide from) the world’s troubles alone.
The services that claim to make something faster, easier, or cheaper are built on top of physical landscapes, legal frameworks, or social orders that were not made to accommodate them.
Ridesharing’s “disruption” is perhaps the most prominent example of convenience overloading existing systems, and those systems bending to accommodate it. In this case, the systems were municipal regulations, employment standards, and users’ expectations for how to get around a city. In his book Blood in the Machine, tech journalist Brian Merchant notes that the arguments against regulation echo one the mill owners made in the fight against the Luddites in the early 1800s. Existing laws regulated mills and set standards for worker training and for the quality of cloth. As businessmen automated manufacturing, they argued that “the regulations on the books are out of date, should not apply to new technologies, and are stifling innovation; they’re really not that important, and no one plans on violating them anyway,” Merchant writes.
The argument that our existing laws are inadequate in the face of progress is so pervasive in the tech industry, breaking rules is basically a strategy. OpenAI’s CEO has said it’s impossible to create their products without access to copyrighted material, and as I write this, the debate continues over how AI firms should license—or should have licensed—the material they use to train their software.
We are still adjusting to new technology—legally, morally, socially. The adjustment will go deeper than making room for a new way of shopping, computing, or getting around. How we react in these (still) early stages—how we comport ourselves and what we demand of the apps and our governments—will have ramifications for generations to come.
It’s not looking good.
The spread of generative AI is the most worrying sign at the moment, but I hear about new, supposedly convenient, yet ultimately unnecessary, technologies every day. Not long ago, it was facial recognition for buying concessions at sporting events. It’s mind-blowing computing power put to mundane use, and it raises big questions about privacy and security. I wonder if the food tastes any better.
To get a sense of the stakes of all-encompassing adaptation to new technology, go outside: massive parking garages in downtown real estate (somehow still necessary even with rideshares); four-lane streets in residential neighborhoods; houses with no stoop and a garage door as the most prominent feature on the facade; interstates along riverfronts; drive-thru-only restaurants; restaurants with double-wide drive-thrus. Cities and landscapes have been remade to accommodate privately owned personal cars. Shared cars or scooters might offer some relief, but the infrastructure has already been changed—these solutions are technology to solve the problems of technology, built not just on top of a system that wasn’t made for them, but on top of a system that wasn’t made for people at all.
This is the world I see in Longstreth’s paintings. The buildings are in places that are hostile to anyone traveling without their own car—shopping centers between batches of suburbs and man-made deserts of pavement. The paintings remind me of the long drives I’ve taken across the US—every exit has the same few fast-food restaurants and gas stations. The public commons is a place people stop at on their way somewhere else. Everyone eats the same value meal because there’s nothing else to eat.
The encroachments of high-tech convenience create a second reality—one that’s virtual and smooth. To someone using a grocery app, the store looks like a list of products on a screen, not the physical supermarket where a worker will go to pick out an order. To a person in a rideshare or driving by GPS, the world between two destinations looks like a line on a map. It’s a little like the augmented reality game Pokémon Go, which dropped monsters and training gyms onto the grids of city streets. Physical reality is a support structure for a world that exists on an individual’s screen. The virtual world imposes its demands on the physical world, often with results that aren’t better for the user or the real world.
Delivery food, for a long time and in many places, meant pizza or Chinese. This wasn’t by accident. Restaurateurs (and in the case of pizza, chains) refined the business model for delivery and developed containers that kept dishes in the best condition possible for the trip to a customer’s house. Modern food delivery promises to make any food into something you can eat at home. But not every dish, and not every restaurant, is built for this.
Traditionally, restaurant dining was a two-party affair. A customer went to a restaurant to dine in or carry out, or they ordered food over the phone that was delivered by an employee of that restaurant. Modern delivery adds two more parties: a food deliverer who is typically classified as an independent contractor and the app that mediates the relationship between everyone involved. The customer orders in the app. The app dispatches the driver. The customer tips the driver through the app. To the user, all of this is virtual—even the handoff of the food can happen through a smart doorbell.
Delivery apps offer something to each party they work with. To customers, the offer is any meal delivered to their door. To restaurants, the offer is new customers, more orders, e-commerce tools, and delivery without the staff (though some apps offer to let restaurants use their own couriers). To deliverers, the offer is the flexibility of the gig economy—be your own boss, work when you want. (I’m going to use the words “driver” and “deliverer” interchangeably, though in many cities, delivery is done on bike.) Each of these parties makes trade-offs if they accept the offer. Drivers take on the usual hazards of gig work. Claude Bahati lives in the UK and signed up to drive for Deliveroo because he liked the autonomy. But the money has been inconsistent. He sometimes works eighteen hours a day, five to seven days a week. Early on, he cleared about a thousand British pounds per week. He earned occasional bonuses by logging on when orders were heavier, too. Now he’s not seeing as many boosts and the orders have dropped. “You’d be lucky if you hit £700 a week,” he says. In response to questions, Deliveroo said this may be related to a change in which deliverers are paid based on distance traveled. (Bahati and many of his fellow drivers have organized with the GMB labor union in the UK to push for changes to pay and to how the apps treat drivers—and these have led to agreements on minimum pay for time and transportation.)
Paying drivers more would mean either reducing profits, upping the fee on the restaurants, or raising prices for customers. “It is always the drivers who get pinched,” Bahati says. The actual cost of a service is unclear to customers in the virtual world. “As a customer, you’re thinking, ‘which one’s the cheapest?’ ” Bahati says. “I don’t think you think about a driver and how much they’re being paid. I think you’re thinking, ‘How quickly can the driver get here?’”
Restaurants can choose whether to be on the apps, but this wasn’t always the case. When DoorDash, GrubHub, Postmates (since purchased by Uber Eats), and Seamless (it’s odd they’re all compounds of short words) launched, restaurants sometimes found themselves listed on the apps without agreeing to participate. Some restaurants sued. California banned the practice. Most apps changed their policies in response.
Modern food delivery promises to make any food into something you can eat at home. But not every dish, and not every restaurant, is built for this.
Given the thin margins of running a restaurant, opting out isn’t an easy decision, especially as customers come to expect delivery. Liz and Jesse Huot own two hamburger restaurants and a bakery in Louisville, Kentucky. They were hesitant to offer delivery at first. “You don’t have control over your food once it leaves,” Jesse says. “Kind of like handing your kid off to a babysitter you’ve never met,” Liz adds. Besides the loss of control, trade-offs for restaurants include fees from the apps and a potential decline in dine-in customers.
The Huots signed up to have their food delivered by DoorDash in 2023. They realized customers seemed okay with a dip in quality in exchange for the ease of delivery. “It’s normal for you to know that your fries suck when you get them delivered,” Liz says. Customers also didn’t mind paying a 30% extra charge for the food—a price the Huots settled on to cover the 15% app commission, the additional packaging, and to offset the drop in tips for servers.
Delivery orders are strong, and the Huots say they feel pressure to make the menu more accommodating. “Our two sides are fries that get soggy and Brussels sprouts that, ten minutes after they’re made, they get a little funky,” Jesse says. “So I’ve considered changing the sides. But people in-house love them, and if I change that, I think it would hurt us.” The solution to soggy fries is a starchy coating that some restaurants have adopted. It keeps them crispier, but it can cause indigestion. To add these, the Huots would need a larger kitchen with room for another frier.
With orders coming in online, the Huots are essentially running additional restaurants out of the same space they had before (they took their bakery off the app due to the challenge of managing inventory between physical and virtual lines). They favor their in-house customers, who provide the bulk of business and who the Huots have a direct relationship with. Online, their restaurants are among the businesses that pop up if someone searches for burgers. In person, the restaurants are a destination and an experience. That experience is why the Huots started their business in the first place. “I’m not passionate about food that lasts a long time in a car,” Jesse says. “That’s not what I got in this for. And if that’s what it became, I would question if I still want to do this.”
Sometimes the Huots turn off online orders to tend to a packed house, which leads to emails from customers asking why they can’t order. This isn’t the only entitled behavior the pair has encountered since the rise of delivery apps and the isolation of the pandemic. Liz has noticed an impatience and a demanding attitude from in-person patrons that wasn’t as prevalent a few years ago. Customers get angry when something is out of stock. At the bakery, they complain if they can’t get an ornately made cake without ordering ahead. “That kind of convenience, people expect it when they walk in the building, too,” Liz says.
This is the discomfort that comes from the virtual and real worlds overlapping. Most of us exist in both places. Yet the rules of the real world don’t always apply virtually, and the behavior of the virtual world, in real life, is typically weird and antisocial. Online, we shop without assistance, lurk on conversations without taking part, and pay to have whatever we want brought to us. The world is shaped around the user, with targeted ads and algorithmic feeds. Spending so much time in the virtual world shifts expectations for the physical world.
This is the discomfort that comes from the virtual and real worlds overlapping.
Participation in the virtual world is the cost of doing business in the physical one. Besides adopting to delivery, many restaurants have changed their lighting, decor, and menus to be visually friendlier for diners who post to Instagram or TikTok. One trend saw posters raving about dishes with melted cheese that stretched as far as possible. Like viral Starbucks drinks, the taste was secondary—what mattered was documenting the consumption.
The virtual world of platforms and apps has given rise to the ghost kitchen—a restaurant that, for the user, exists only on apps. Some ghost kitchens operate out of shared facilities with no storefront, and can give aspiring chefs a way to test out ideas. Other times, a restaurant owner sets up a second, online-only brand in their kitchen to boost sales. The concept is an outgrowth not only of delivery apps, but of the rise in commercial rents. The crisis of the pandemic made moonlighting via ghost kitchens essential for some restaurants to survive.
Not every virtual eatery is a passion project. Some are chains managed by a corporate parent and are often branded with celebrity endorsements or gimmicky names that appeal to novelty on the apps—examples include Egg the F* Out, OMG BBQ LOL, and B*tch Don’t Grill My Cheese. Virtual chains compete against the small restaurateurs who the concept of ghost kitchens was supposed to save—and sometimes restaurateurs are competing against themselves, if they add a virtual brand to their business. People pursuing their passion are made to pursue it in the same kitchen that turns out pancakes for a virtual chain called Granny Pannies (a real ghost kitchen). The customers may not know the difference between the businesses, since every restaurant looks the same on the app.
As of May 2025, a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from Egg the F* Out in New York City is $19.09, more than three times what it would be at one of the city’s many bodegas. Food delivery was never about being cheaper, though. It’s not guaranteed to be faster. It’s rarely better. Delivery via app offers users control over their participation in a once-public activity—a virtual alternative to reality. It lets diners get whatever they want and eat it alone, away from the friction of the physical world and away from reminders of what it takes to make and serve food, and the people who do this work. If diners want to be social, they can get a viral dish that looks good on camera.
A few years ago, I went to my hometown in rural Illinois for Christmas. On a walk, I saw a sign advertising MrBeast Burger sticking out of the snow-covered grass at the edge of a park. I wondered who had put it there over the holiday—out in the cold, surrounded by cornfields, hoping someone might pick up their phone and order a burger. I thought about the person who might place the order—curious, looking for novelty, unaware of what it would take to get a meal themed around their favorite YouTube star. I wondered where the food would come from and how far someone would need to drive to drop it off. But these were concerns of the physical world. More and more, that’s not where we live.
Gabe Bullard is a journalist, critic, and broadcaster. He has written for NPR, The New York Times Magazine, Nieman Reports, 99% Invisible, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Magazine, among other outlets. He was a Nieman journalism fellow at Harvard University and is co-founder of Together, Alone, an online magazine of television criticism. He’s from the Midwest and now lives in Switzerland.
On the evening of December 22, 2013, an armored van packed with cash made its rounds through the regal streets of Vienna. The city’s elegant Baroque buildings were trimmed with glinting strings of lights; Christmas markets sold spiced glühwein on cobbled squares. A little after midnight, as the festivities quieted, the van, operated by the security company Loomis, stopped at a walk-up ATM on a desolate stretch of storefronts. Two guards stepped out, entered a room-size vestibule behind the machine, and commenced replenishing the ATM with cash. A minute later, two figures wearing black balaclavas and carrying handguns emerged from the shadows and followed the guards inside.
The pair ordered the guards onto the ground and handcuffed them. After snatching the keys to the armored van, one of them unlocked the vehicle and began stuffing crisp bank notes into black duffel bags. The thieves then checked the street for witnesses and disappeared into the night with nearly three million euros.
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It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed, revealing intimate knowledge of Loomis’s anti-theft procedures—perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street whenever it was being restocked. The images were blurry, but they revealed that the perpetrator who climbed into the van was short enough to stand upright without hitting their head. Detectives decided that it was almost certainly a woman.
They soon homed in on a former Loomis employee, Tamara S., who, when she worked for the company, had scheduled the routes and was only five feet three inches tall. On the morning of January 10, 2014, federal police raided Tamara’s apartment and arrested her. Initially she denied any involvement in the robbery, but eventually she confessed. Investigators were stunned when she named her accomplice. The man she claimed had masterminded the job was one of their own: Gabriel E., a former officer in the city’s WEGA unit, the Viennese equivalent of SWAT.
The next day, a team that included some of Gabriel’s former colleagues raided his upscale apartment and placed him under arrest. Unlike Tamara, Gabriel confessed right away. When detectives asked why he had committed such an audacious crime, he replied that he hadn’t stolen the money for himself. He’d done it for the children of Africa; he planned to build an orphanage there.
It sounded absurd—the kind of desperate lie a thief might invent to deflect blame or ameliorate punishment—but it was very much the truth.
“Wouldn’t it be right,” Gabriel asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?”
Austrians have a reputation, even among themselves, as scrupulous rule followers. In Vienna it’s rare to glimpse people jaywalking, and the city’s subway runs on an honor system. An Austrian friend suggested that this predilection had its roots in the country’s imperial past. From its power center in Austria, the Hapsburg monarchy ruled enormous portions of Europe for six centuries with the help of a dizzyingly complex bureaucracy. The compulsion to follow rules even a hundred years after the Hapsburgs lost power, my friend explained, was like the twitching of empire’s phantom limb. (Austria is also a very private country; the media don’t report the full names of people involved in criminal cases, a practice I’m abiding by too.)
As a police officer, Gabriel had been an enforcer of rules in a rule-bound society, making his crime all the more perplexing. His family told me that he was staunchly law-abiding, and had never incurred so much as a speeding ticket. In retrospect, however, they realized that there had been hints of where he was headed. He always loved to give things: presents to his three children, donations to charity, food to people begging in the street. After leaving the police force and starting a private-security business, he became wealthy, only to grow conspicuously ascetic, donating increasingly large amounts of money and possessions. By the time he was arrested, he’d sold his Audi and his Rolex, and he was down to almost his last suit. When police raided his home, they found bags filled with clothes purchased from H&M that Gabriel planned to give away.
*The Atavist is using pseudonyms for Gabriel’s family members.
Gabriel’s son Florian* recalled that the summer before the Loomis heist, his father had posed a curious hypothetical. “Wouldn’t it be right,” he asked, “to steal something from a bank and give it to the poor?” Florian, who was studying to become a police officer himself, disagreed, and his father dropped the issue.
Still, to idly philosophize about such a crime was one thing. To actually do it—to fashion oneself into a twenty-first-century Robin Hood—was another.
After his arrest, Gabriel was remanded to Vienna’s largest and most forbidding jail, Josefstadt. When I visited him there in 2014, I expected to encounter someone solemn and morally serious—a grim-faced saint. But when Gabriel entered the room, he radiated the warm excitement of a Labrador retriever. A tall, fit man of 50 with fetching salt-and-pepper stubble, Gabriel was wearing a cerulean-blue hoodie, clear-plastic-rimmed glasses, and a beaded necklace. He looked less like a former law enforcement officer than a hip Los Angeles dad. We sat down, and without hesitation Gabriel, still the inveterate benefactor, offered me exactly what I wanted: an explanation of how he’d gotten into this mess.
Gabriel’s childhood, he told me, had been shaped by “gruesomeness.” He was raised in Tyrol, Austria’s bucolic eastern province, by an alcoholic father given to punching his two sons. Gabriel and his elder brother eventually came under the care of their grandmother, who as punishment would regularly lock them in a darkened closet. “I had a very fucking childhood,” he told me in emphatic, accented English, omitting an adjective but still making the point. (After our first encounter, I would meet with Gabriel several times in the ensuing decade and communicate with him by letter, phone, and email.)
The two siblings both went into law enforcement, Gabriel in Vienna, where he hoped to help others in desperate situations, and his brother in the state police. Athletic and competitive, Gabriel quickly made the famed Wiener Einsatzgruppe Alarmabteilung (WEGA), the Vienna police department’s most expertly trained unit. Despite his severe upbringing, Gabriel was by nature cheerful. Every WEGA operation, as he saw it, was a new problem to be solved through hard work and an upbeat attitude.
One afternoon in 1994, Gabriel told me, his WEGA squad was tasked with busting up a drug deal in Vienna’s Fifteenth District, which at the time was the city’s seediest neighborhood. When the team moved to make an arrest, the seller, an African immigrant, bolted. Gabriel pursued him, shouting for the man to stop and firing his pistol in the air. As he closed in, the suspect turned and pulled out his own handgun. The two men exchanged fire, hitting each other in the thigh. Gabriel tackled the dealer and, following a short, bloody wrestling match, overpowered him. The pair shared an awkward ambulance ride to the hospital.
The shooting put Gabriel’s relentless positivity to the test. He endured months of physical therapy to regain the use of his leg. When he returned to work, he transitioned out of WEGA. After a brief, unhappy stint as a traffic cop, he left the force entirely. In 2001, he started his own private-security company, specializing in investigations of corporate theft. He gave it an English name: Service of Secrecy. The early years were lean as Gabriel struggled against larger competitors, but as word of his talents spread, the business thrived.
Gabriel occasionally found himself thinking about the man who’d shot him. He saw him only one additional time, in court, and knew little of his past—not even which country he was from. But at some point, Gabriel learned that the man was an asylum-seeker, as were so many African immigrants in Austria. They’d begun arriving in the country in the 1990s, fleeing civil wars and ailing economies. Gabriel wondered what the man’s life had been like back home, what he was running from.
In 2006, Gabriel told me, he had an opportunity to visit Africa himself; a client had recommended him to authorities in the Central African nation of Gabon, which was interested in creating its own version of WEGA. He told me he flew down for an interview with the defense minister, Ali Bongo, the son of the country’s notoriously corrupt authoritarian president, Omar Bongo, and was offered a lucrative multiyear consulting contract. Gabriel didn’t love the idea of working for a despot, but he had a family to support. And at the end of the day, someone was going to train the country’s police. Why not him? Gabriel accepted the job.
He commuted between Gabon and Austria every few weeks. During his trips to Gabon, he told me, he spent much of his time touring the countryside, where Bongo wanted to establish an array of military bases. The poverty Gabriel witnessed shocked him. By African standards Gabon was wealthy, mainly due to its coastal oil reserves. In the capital, Libreville, a former French colonial port, supermarkets stocked expensive Bordeaux and Roquefort cheese. But the wealth was unequally distributed. “People lived in huts without ANYTHING,” Gabriel wrote to me in 2015. “Yet merely one hundred meters further I could see pompous buildings with inconceivable luxury.” The experience, he added, “completely overwhelmed me.”
Gabriel began to feel guilty about the money he made, which had bought him a posh apartment and car. He responded to his unease with an energetic program of handouts. Gabriel had been raised Catholic and later joined a Pentecostal church. He told me that charity was an important part of his faith. He decided to give money to destitute Gabonese. There was no formal plan; when he encountered someone in need—particularly single mothers and people requiring medical care they couldn’t afford—he gave them whatever cash he had.
Back in Vienna, Gabriel’s family was growing. Following an amicable divorce, he had remained close with his first wife, Sabine, with whom he had two children, Julia and Florian. He remarried a woman who taught French—helpful for his work in Gabon, where French is the official language—and, in 2012, she gave birth to his third child. Domestic life was good. But the feeling that plagued Gabriel abroad persisted at home. Soon he began filling the trunk of his car with clothes, toys, appliances, and other items, then driving east to Romania, where he’d stop in poor villages and give it all away. Sometimes he took his two elder children, who by then were teenagers and growing concerned about Gabriel’s haphazard giving. (So was their mother.) But the donations, and the astonished smiles of the people who received them, never failed to make Gabriel happy. It felt more than good, he told me once. Then he paused, searching for the correct English word. “It was,” he said, “mandatory. My duty. My obligation.”
In 2009, Omar Bongo died, and his son left the ministry of defense to run for president. The new defense minister, Gabriel told me, declined to renew his contract. Although the lost income was regrettable, Gabriel was by then so consumed by his mission to help Gabon’s people that he didn’t mind. While making his ad hoc contributions to everyday Gabonese, Gabriel had begun to dream of something bigger—something that, to his mind, would be truly consequential.
His difficult upbringing had made him empathetic toward children in dire circumstances, particularly those without parents. He wanted to instill in a frightened child a durable sense of safety and security—a feeling that, growing up, he had been denied. Before leaving Gabon at the end of his consultancy, Gabriel began drawing up plans to build an orphanage there. It was to be a whole complex, in fact, where every child would have their own lodgings, painted in bright colors, and where all their needs would be met. He named the imagined community Blue Sky Village.
Back in Vienna, Gabriel began soliciting donations to make Blue Sky Village a reality. He estimated that he’d need nearly a million euros to begin the project, and he wrote dozens of letters to aid organizations and philanthropists requesting help in financing the plan. Soliciting charity, Gabriel found, was much tougher than handing it out. He received few responses. The people who did reply politely suggested that, given his lack of experience in the aid space, he donate to existing groups. But investigating corporate theft hadn’t done much for his faith in how companies managed their money. What’s more, Gabriel thought that a lot of groups wasted money on lavish fundraisers—the Viennese have a long tradition of philanthropic balls—rather than spending it on people in need. He grew angry when he thought about money being used for frivolities when children were starving and scared. “This makes me so… hateful,” he told me. The only way to know that orphans in Gabon were being saved, he thought, was to save them himself.
As he struggled to get his project off the ground, Gabriel received a call from an old WEGA colleague named Heinz, who was now working in security for Loomis. The company had suffered some recent employee thefts, and Heinz wanted Gabriel to help its Austrian branch sharpen its embezzlement protocols.
In a bleak irony, Heinz had been fired from the Viennese police in 2006, after he was accused of beating a Gambian immigrant resisting deportation. Gabriel told me that he’d heard about Heinz’s case in the media. Despite what Heinz had allegedly done, Gabriel found it easy to rationalize taking the Loomis job: The more money he earned, the more he could give away to those in need. He agreed to come on as a consultant, and the two men became friendly. Soon, Heinz introduced Gabriel to a Loomis employee named Tamara.
“I do unashamedly want to write page-turners,” Jon Ronson told The New Yorker in an interview. “I can never understand why most nonfiction books have such limited creative ambitions.” Ronson, who is “not a thrill-seeker,” then recounts fearing for his life while being pursued by members of a secretive political gathering—a chase that found its way into Them: Adventures with Extremists, his 2001 breakthrough book. Thrills have a way of finding Ronson, either through active pursuit or some subtler means of revelation. The Men Who Stare At Goats begins with a US Army general who attempts to walk through walls, repeatedly smacking into them. In the opening of The Psychopath Test, a neurologist hands Ronson a baffling package, copies of which have been anonymously mailed to academics throughout the world. The pages turn themselves.
Ronson’s latest, The Castle, earned a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which praised the book as “a blockbuster portrait of men gone mad” and Ronson’s style as “intuitive but rigorous.” His podcast, Things Fell Apart, was recently renewed for a third season, in which Ronson will shift focus from American culture wars to individual battles against institutions. He once told The Guardian, “I get called faux-naïf all the time. But I honestly think I am just genuinely naive.” It’s an observation that reminds me of Joan Didion’s own famous self-assessment: that she was “so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive . . . that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests.” Ronson is warmer than that, but his access is no less astonishing. Time and again, someone allows him to get very close—closer, perhaps, than they might be aware of. Each of Ronson’s books is a testament to his depth of inquiry, his proximity to the surprising, and his conviction that a good narrative should be propulsive.
—Brendan Fitzgerald
Where did you grow up?
Cardiff, Wales. In a suburb called Lisvane.
What places feel like home?
London, for sure. As a child, when we’d visit my grandparents, I’d sneak away and jump on a bus and just get lost in the City. Even when it wasn’t home, it felt like home. Eventually I lived there for decades, loving especially Soho and Islington. I also love our tiny town in the Hudson Valley. We’ve lived here since 2019.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
As a teenager, watching Nick Broomfield documentaries and reading the great nonfiction adventurers from the ’60s and ’70s like Hunter S. Thompson and PJ O’Rourke and the writers featured in Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism. And when I started in journalism, the editors who first gave me a break: Ian Parker, Chris Heath, Deborah Orr, Ian Katz.
What is your favorite time of day?
Early morning. I make a coffee and for the first few hours my brain is at its best and I can write a lot.
What are you really good at?
Narrative nonfiction. If I go off on some journey, I know exactly how to make it work. It’s the only thing I’m good at.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
Recently the BBC gave me a subscription to Descript, a text-based audio editing program. It’s a dream gift for a detail-oriented storyteller. I can finally do the audio editing myself. I sit there for hours.
Describe your favorite meal.
I guess some kind of salad with lots of fruit and vegetables and a good dressing. You can’t beat Greek dressing.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Silence! I can’t believe how great the silence is here in the Hudson Valley. There’s something very comforting about knowing it won’t end. They’ll never turn this country lane into a big road.
Where do you do your best thinking?
When I’m out on a story, in some strange place, gathering material. I just instinctively know what’ll work, what the best moments are. Fiction people can do that in their imaginations. I can’t. But when I’m out on a story, I just know.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
The journey of leaving Cardiff and moving to London when I was 18. I felt like finally my life could begin.
Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson. I listen to it over and over to get to sleep. So I still don’t know how he dies.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
Every book I’ve written has chapters I’m equally proud of: sneaking into Bohemian Grove with Alex Jones and getting chased by the Bilderberg Group in Them, the goat staring in The Men Who Stare At Goats, pretty much all of The Psychopath Test, much of Lost at Sea, Justine Sacco in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. The Castle feels really good. I felt very confident writing it, mixing up tones and styles in a way I don’t think I could have managed before.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Just wandering around Reddit can be good. The whole world is somewhere on Reddit. And if you don’t find your next story, it might still unlock some part of your brain.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Kurt Vonnegut, for his brevity and his clashes between comedy and horror.
What words do you overuse?
It used to be “There was a silence” but I’ve cured myself of that, thank God.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
I don’t know if this counts, but every book I read for pleasure is a celebrity memoir, mostly musicians and actors. Cher. Anthony Hopkins. Bruce Springsteen. I LOVED the English actor Kathy Burke’s one, A Mind Of My Own. Right now it’s Johnny Marr.
What superpower would you like to have?
I think I’d like to be able to shoot fire out of my hands. No. Teleportation through space and time.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I really identified with my dog, Floppy—how he wanted to be around people but didn’t want to interact with them.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Run or walk.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense. The Pitt. Succession. All of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, especially Doechii, Sierra Ferrell, and Chappell Roan. Bruce Springsteen’s 1979 No Nukes concert video. Huh, it’s almost all music. I guess that’s the stuff we should remember. People being their best.
What does your writing space look like?
Jon Ronson’s nonfiction books include So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Psychopath Test, Them: Adventures with Extremists, Lost at Sea, and The Men Who Stare At Goats.They have all been international and/or New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into more than 30 languages. His latest book, The Castle, is now available.
I was sad last fall when I read and recommended Jaya Saxena’s final story for Eater. Saxena is a food writer the Longreads editors have followed for years, and a journalist I’ve always counted on for food writing that both informs and entertains; she goes deep on aspects of cuisine, dining, the restaurant industry, and food culture in a way that’s relatable and unpretentious. (She’s also the series editor of The Best AmericanFood and Travel Writing anthology; you can preorder the 2026 edition now.) So I was glad to hear, earlier this year, that Saxena and other former Eater writers were cooking up something new.
That something is Ravenous, a worker-owned, subscriber-supported food and culture site founded by Saxena, Amy McCarthy, Ashok Selvam, Courtney E. Smith, and Frances Dumlao. The five journalists are “sick and tired of the conversation around food being reduced to AI-generated pablum, ‘best of’ lists, and influencer-driven trends,” and are building a home for the kind of thoughtful, curious reporting that’s become harder to publish in a broken media landscape. Or, as they put it: food media with teeth.
Next week, Ravenous launches a monthlong fundraiser, so now is the perfect time to support the site. Seven dollars a month, or $70 a year, gets you access to everything they publish; higher-tier plans come with more perks. (Sign up for the Regular plan—$25 a month, or $250 a year—and you get to give the Ravenous raven a nickname, which they include in their Sunday newsletters.)
If anyone can build a publication around engaging, relevant food reporting and storytelling, it’s Saxena and this crew. Have a look around Ravenous and consider subscribing. But be warned: Don’t browse when you’re hungry.
I was born and raised in New York City, and aside from a brief stint in New Orleans for college, I’m still here. Except now I’m over in Queens instead of my hometown of Manhattan.
What places feel like home?
Aside from my actual apartment and the one I grew up in: Various NYC beaches, the backyard of my local bar, a punk show, Ray’s Pizza & Bagel Cafe on St. Mark’s Place, and one specific rock in Central Park.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
For high school I went to a Quaker school in Manhattan, and though I don’t consider myself religious in any way, Quaker values began shaping my future politics then. It’s where I first started learning about the value of consensus-based community decision making, and given that this was in the early 2000s, anti-war and anti-violence politics. I even remember a teacher making the case that cars should be banned in Manhattan. It was a big influence on my politics and value systems.
What is your favorite time of day?
To work, right after I wake up, around 8 a.m., when my mind hasn’t filled with the noise of the day. Otherwise, early evening when it’s still light out, and everything is just beginning.
What are you really good at?
Untangling necklaces.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
One year my wife bought me a Cameo of the cow from First Cow, whose handler fed her a treat in my honor. The video is one of my most prized possessions.
Describe your favorite meal.
Of course as a food writer this is tripping me up, because are we talking about a single great meal I’ve experienced, or a dish I could eat every day? If it’s the former, it’s the time my wife and I walked into a random seafood counter in Valencia, Spain, and spent the night eating sardines in garlic oil and sparkling wine from ceramic cups. If it’s the latter, my mom’s mac and cheese.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
I’m a city kid, so too much silence scares me. I need the background noise of people on the street to get anything done.
Where do you do your best thinking?
In the shower or walking around listening to music.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
In 2018, my wife and I traveled with my dad to his hometown in India. It was the first time he had been back since before I was born, and being able to experience that with him was so important. We also ate absolutely the best kebab I’ve ever had in my life. Maybe I should have put that as my favorite meal.
Where do you like to read?
On the subway.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
My friend recently introduced me to the case of Judy Smith, a woman who went missing during a trip to Philadelphia and was discovered murdered in the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina. I have now spent a lot of time reading conspiracies about what happened to her.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Defector has fantastic culture coverage, I love every issue Cake Zine puts out, and some of the best money I’ve spent recently is on the monthly print issue of The Onion.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
This piece in The New Yorker by Lauren Collins about El Mordjene, an Algerian hazelnut spread that white French people are being very racist about. It’s just such a good exploration of how something innocuous becomes the center of a culture war. I was also thrilled to find the spread at an Egyptian grocer in my neighborhood, and sorry white French people, it is better than Nutella.
What was the last book you read?
I had somehow never read Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice, but after watching the TV series my friends and I decided to read it together.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
“The Food That Makes You Gay,” for Eater. I had editors that really trusted me to follow my instincts, and I managed to thread together some things I had an inkling were related. I’m also just glad I could get a full throated defense of bodily autonomy and the right to change one’s body in a piece that started out talking about straight men being afraid to eat bananas in public.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Walk away from the computer. I just need to do something else, anything else, for a while.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Reading just about anything will definitely help me, but I love Helen Rosner’s food writing. And I tend to listen to a lot of music when I need inspiration, so as far as lyricists go, probably Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Joni Mitchell, Prince, and Paul Simon.
What words do you overuse?
I write pretty conversationally, so I sprinkle in a lot of “just” and “of course” and “perhaps” that I usually have to go back and delete.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a “guilty” pleasure (unless it’s like, continuing to read Harry Potter after J.K. Rowling has made it clear that doing so supports her transphobic work). No one should feel guilty about doing something that brings them joy. But in terms of indulgences that make little sense to others, I love a Hershey’s Cookies ‘N’ Creme bar.
What superpower would you like to have?
Generously, the power to instantly heal others. Selfishly, the power to have three cocktails and sleep through the night.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
Any time I see a photo of a magpie standing on its nest made of shiny, pretty things, that’s me.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Unfortunately, I’m probably looking on my phone. I have a very dumb “project” where I am trying to train my Instagram algorithm to show me the absolute worst videos out there. But I am trying to get better about doing things like taking a walk to the river, or practicing a new hobby (my latest one is trying to learn some card tricks).
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
A copy of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, a bootleg Knicks champion shirt, a fortune teller fish, a bottle of 4711 cologne, and a DVD of Velvet Goldmine.
What does your writing space look like?
You should know for this photo I am standing directly against my bed, which my cats sit on all day and scream at me from. You should also know half the time I’m not even here, and instead writing with my laptop on the couch.
Jaya Saxena is an IACP Award-winning, James Beard Award-nominated writer and editor, and a lifelong New Yorker. She enjoys covering the intersections of food and immigration, business, history, policy, queerness, and just about every way we use food to say something about ourselves. She is the series editor for The Best American Food and Travel Writing. Her work has appeared in Eater, Slate, Gourmet, GQ, The New York Times, Defector, and more. You can email her at jaya@weareravenous.com.
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At one time, Rachel Hartigan edited The Washington Post’s Book World. During a 12-year stint as a writer, reporter, and editor with National Geographic, she covered everything from the genetics of persimmon trees to the long road to women’s suffrage.
She spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about being a self-taught writer, how being open to opportunity can change your career, and how editing others can help you improve your own writing.
This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow.
—Krista Stevens
Brendan: What did your career look like in your head at the start, and how did that change?
Rachel: I was not a kid with a clear version of what I wanted to do. I really like to read, to write, and to learn things. My parents were quite aggravated with me because they had spent a lot of money to educate me. I tried being a paralegal at a legal publishing company and then at the Nevada State Legislature. I was probably lounging on the sofa when my dad came in and slapped a Harper’s Magazine on me and said, “There are internships there. You should apply to that.” OK, it’s in New York. I have friends in New York, so that’s what I did, and somehow I got it. My career has not been a straight path; it’s been a lot of happenstance where I somehow get a job and figure out how to do it once I’m there. People come to me with plans and say, “I’m going to do this, this, and this,” but that’s not my mindset. I wish I was more like that. My career is always a surprise to me.
Brendan: With pursuing something a bit squishy, like writing, how did you deal with the pressure of expectation and the burden to prove yourself to your peers and your parents?
Rachel: My parents weren’t too bad; I was harder on myself because I never went to journalism school. I have always felt like an apprentice, like I’m still figuring it out. It’s only recently that I feel like I know how to do this. I know how to structure something. I know how to get a reader going, but I never felt like I had the right credentials. One reason I’ve gone back and forth with writing and editing—and I feel like each one has helped the other—is because it’s much easier to spot the weaknesses in somebody else’s draft than in mine. Sometimes it’s harder to do with your own prose.
Brendan: An apt metaphor, be it someone else’s work or your own, is looking under the hood like a mechanic to see how things are working, whether everything’s moving as it should. How do you revisit text or analyze work that inspires you, so you can learn from it and apply it to your own work?
Rachel: I have a copy of David Grann’s The Lost City of Z where I wrote down what each paragraph was doing, and what each chapter was doing, trying to figure out how he balanced telling a historical tale—the story of those who were looking for Percy Fawcett—as well as his own story. I used to do that with features I liked, or if I was assigned a feature and I had no idea how to go about it, I would look at similar ones, whether from my colleagues or from other publications, and break down the structure. It gets you over the hump of the blank page because you don’t have to worry about how you start your masterpiece. You’re just like, nope, this is what this paragraph has to do.
Brendan: How have you cultivated that sense of voice over your writing career?
Rachel: I’ve been a journalist for a very long time. Clarity has always been a priority, especially at National Geographic. When I was writing scientific stories, some of them had to be really, really short. It’s front-of-book for the magazine, and it’s almost like writing poetry because every word has to count. If you’re doing something complicated, you have to think about how the reader is taking it in. Is this clear to the reader? Is the reader going to want to read the next paragraph? Where is the momentum? I’m thinking about that a lot. I’m trying to remember that I’m in partnership with a reader, and they need to understand what I’m writing about.
Brendan: How do you approach interviewing as a skill and as a craft?
Rachel: I always have my questions, but I’m not an aggressive interviewer. I like to let people talk, and I like to use people’s own words in my writing. I like to hear people’s voices, so I am probably a minimalist interviewer, though I wouldn’t say a minimalist reporter. But for instance, when I went on expeditions to Nikumaroro—an island where some think Amelia Earhart died as a castaway—I felt like I was a spy and an eavesdropper. I would interview people and ask them what they were doing, but mostly I was trying to watch and listen and see how people were doing, and I hoped they would forget I’m there.
Brendan: I love what you said at the start of your book, about being bored with your job working on tiny morsels for the magazine, bored with your marriage to another deskbound journalist, and most of all, bored of yourself. Take us to that moment, this middle-age malaise, this boredom.
Rachel: I was in my little cubicle writing and editing for the front-of-book, which was fairly routine. I knew what was happening: This week and the next was writing, and the next week was editing. My son was in school, so there was his school routine, and I just didn’t know what I wanted to do next. The writing and editing for the front-of-book had become pretty easy, and I felt somewhat underemployed. But here I am again at my desk, and literally, one of the editors at Nat Geo, Glenn Oeland, stopped me in the hallway and said, “We have a berth on this ship going out to an island in the Pacific. Do you want to go?” And I said yes, and I really had no idea where I was going.
When I started at Nat Geo, I had been a book review editor at the The Washington Post, which is a very desk-bound job. I had no idea what I was doing, so I said yes to things, which up until that point wasn’t anything hugely dramatic. So this was the biggest yes. I realized it wasn’t just a yes that I had to say, but I also had to get buy-in from my then-husband and my son, who was 12 at the time. I had to think about all the details involved in going to a place like this. I had never been on a ship; I had never been anywhere tropical. But once I got on the ship, I focused on doing the story, and it felt like a huge weight fell off my shoulders, even though I was very seasick at first. But once the preparation is over, you immerse yourself in the story and the people, trying to figure out the dynamics of what you need to find out. It’s such a flow state.
My career has not been a straight path; it’s been a lot of happenstance where I somehow get a job and figure out how to do it once I’m there.
Brendan: And as you’re reporting and tackling the project at large, it can be overwhelming to think about the scope of it. Thinking: This is going to be a book. How do I even do that? In what way did this book stretch you?
Rachel: I did two expeditions, one looking for Amelia Earhart’s bones, and the other with Robert Ballard, who is the man who found the Titanic, looking for her plane in the waters around the island. So it was fairly clear what the stories were. But once I got back from the second expedition and started thinking about doing a book on it, I was really struggling. For one thing, we never found anything. We still don’t know what happened to her. So, is there really a book here? And if there is a book, how do I write about all these different things? At least four narratives needed to be tackled. I could have just written a book that theorized what happened to her. I was frustrated when writing news stories because it was mostly about the search for her, not as much about Earhart herself. I didn’t know that much about her beyond what we learn in elementary school: a groundbreaking aviator disappears. I really wanted something that incorporated more of her biography. So that would be one narrative. But then there’s all the theories and the people who pursued them, and it’s all very involved. I had a hard time figuring out how to braid all those strands together.
Brendan: You came up with a three-part structure: captured, castaway, and sank. How did you arrive at three “deaths of Amelia” as the scaffolding to weave these stories around?
Rachel: It was challenging to figure out how to approach each theory, how to lay it out in a way that wouldn’t be utterly baffling to the reader. The first way I tried was utterly baffling to my editor, so I had to have another go. I was trying to do it almost chronologically, which involved all the theories all at once, and it would have been very difficult. So instead, I decided to alternate between the biography chapters and one theory at a time, starting from the least likely to the most likely. I don’t advocate for any one theory in the book, but part of the reason I wanted to start with the least likely is that it’s also the most exciting.
Brendan: You mention that there have been solid biographies written about Earhart. I imagine that as you were looking to sell this book, you were wondering about what can be said that hasn’t already been said? How did you approach selling a new book on Amelia Earhart?
Rachel: In my darkest moments, I’m like, who needs this book? I don’t know. There had been some good biographies, and a lot of the different searchers had written books arguing for what they think happened. There hadn’t really been a book that combined it all, and there hadn’t been a book that contextualized the searches. I think that’s what helped sell the book.
Brendan: I love the first third of the book or so. You write that she wanted a life of purpose and she couldn’t imagine finding it in a purely domestic existence. What do you think she was so, almost at ease, with bucking societal norms of the time?
Rachel: I think she was interested in what was new, in new experiences, in new technology; having a life where things basically stayed the same just would have been the end of her. I just don’t think she would have been able to handle that. She had an unstable childhood, but her parents did well. They had two girls, and when the girls wanted a BB gun, they got a BB gun. Her mom sewed them rompers so that they could actually play rather than being constricted in dresses. She was raised to be herself, basically, and I think she never learned how to shut that down, which is wonderful. She was always looking for what she could do beyond what was expected of her, you know, how can I be what I want to be when society expects me to be a certain way? It’s a question that we all still struggle with. And she was pretty eloquent about wanting people to be able to do what they wanted.
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