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 American Food 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.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Where did you grow up?

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.

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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.

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.

Hartigan’s first book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, both a biography of the aviator’s life and a survey of the leading theories surrounding her death and disappearance, is now available. 

This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow. 

—Krista Stevens

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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.

Listen to the full conversation below.

Recommending stories from Emi Nietfeld, Brendan Borrell, Boyce Upholt, Fernando Pinho, and Vann R. Newkirk II.

War stories, new colors, and the joy in getting hands on in art and gardening.

Holbrook Mohr and Mitch Weiss | The Atavist Magazine | July 2026 | 2,284 words (8 minutes)

This is an excerpt from issue no. 178, “Toxic Lies.”

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January 3, 2026

In the isolation ward of a hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, a nurse approaches Ron Fowler’s bed, cell phone extended in her hand.

“You have a call,” she says.

Fowler’s eyes flutter open. He tugs off his oxygen tube and, with trembling fingers, accepts the phone.

“Thanks,” he whispers, before turning his attention to us—the callers.

From his voice it’s clear that something is very wrong; he sounds nothing like his usual self. He’s due the next day to meet us for an interview in Paducah, Kentucky, where he and his friend Chuck Deuschle worked at a uranium-enrichment plant that helped fuel America’s nuclear arsenal. Years ago they blew the whistle on the government and its contractors for poisoning thousands of atomic workers. “Can’t make it,” Fowler chokes out. “Blood clots. Hospital. They may have to remove some toes—if those clots don’t reach my heart first. If they do…” He trails off, the terrible ending hanging in the air.

Fowler, soon to turn 77, is desperate to talk before it’s too late—to pull up the memories one more time and commit them to the historical record. He and Deuschle had both moved to Kentucky to work at the nuclear plant, only to discover a grim secret: The facility was exposing people to dangerously high levels of radiation and toxic chemicals, and had concealed the truth about it from employees and the surrounding community. This went on for decades. Faced with a choice—either walk away or stay and sound the alarm—Fowler and Deuschle returned to work, day after day.

More than thirty years later, lying in the hospital with cancer, Fowler is certain that the plant doomed him to a slow, painful death. At 83, Deuschle is also fighting a serious health issue: an unexplained autoimmune disease. They believe their fellow whistleblowers—Deuschle’s wife, Kay, and their friend Garland “Bud” Jenkins—succumbed to illnesses caused by the plant. Still, they’d do it all again. Someone had to reveal the callous disregard the government and the plant’s operators had shown their own people.

Fowler and Deuschle have never shared their story in full—the details of what it was like to live, breathe, and possibly die from their commitment to the truth. But they want people to know, particularly in light of recent news reports: In August 2025, more than a decade after the plant was shut down, a private firm announced that it planned to revive uranium-enrichment operations there. To Fowler and Deuschle, it seems wrong to begin a new chapter in Paducah’s nuclear story. Many former employees are still seeking compensation for their exposure to radiation. Will future generations of workers be any safer?

Fowler struggles for each breath.

“Time’s up,” the nurse says gently, reaching for the phone. “You need to rest.”

Fowler grips the device tighter.

“Call tomorrow when you meet with Chuck,” he implores. “I’m staying alive until then.” He pauses for a moment. “Just make sure Chuck’s with you. Promise me.”

We promise.

1.

One morning in late 1991, Ron Fowler stood in front of the bathroom mirror, parting his hair to the side and noting the first strands of gray at his temples. His beard was neatly trimmed, his black slacks and white dress shirt crisply pressed. He was ready. Today would be his first day at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a uranium-enrichment facility about ten miles outside Paducah, Kentucky. This was more than just a job—it was the start of a new life.

Fowler was a health physicist, an expert in the science of radiation protection. For years he’d traveled the country to train workers at nuclear plants in safety protocols. The pay was great, but being on the road weeks at a time had worn him down. When he moved to Paducah in his early forties, Fowler had already lived in Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Arkansas. Paducah promised stability: the perfect place to settle through retirement. His wife’s parents even moved from Illinois to be nearby.

After eating breakfast—a sausage patty and a scrambled egg—he kissed his wife, Sandi, goodbye and slipped out the door. He steered his green Oldsmobile Delta 88 through the country roads outside Paducah and let his mind drift back to his childhood in Florence, South Carolina. Life there had been simple. His father, who dropped out of school in the fourth grade, supported the family by working on the railroad. Florence was a place where men had jobs, women tended to the home and children, everyone went to church, and neighbors helped neighbors who fell on hard times. Paducah felt just as close-knit. Folks looked out for one another, and honest labor was rewarded.

Situated on the Ohio River where it meets the Tennessee, Paducah owes its origins to trade; it was founded in 1827 by William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition and named for a powerful Native American tribe. The area is naturally beautiful—the city is surrounded by rolling hills and sprawling plains dotted with ponds. For Fowler, a keen fisherman, it was paradise. Paducah had about 27,000 residents when he arrived. It was big enough to have all the right shops, yet small enough that restaurant owners knew whether regulars preferred barbecue or fried catfish, the local staples.

As Fowler drove, the plant appeared in the distance. It spread over some 3,500 acres—750 of them secured by fences and gates—and sat amid modest homes and farms. The community was proud of this place because of its long history supporting the military. Originally, it was a TNT munitions factory, built during World War II. Later, as Cold War tensions escalated, officials scouted locations for a uranium feed facility to supply weapons-production sites in Piketon, Ohio, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with the material required to make nuclear bombs. Paducah native Alben Barkley leveraged his position as Harry S. Truman’s vice president, campaigning aggressively to repurpose the munitions factory in his hometown. He recognized that the project likely would inject billions into the local economy and transform living standards for the region’s blue-collar workforce.

Construction of the nuclear plant began in 1951. By the following year, it was enriching uranium for atomic bombs and the Navy’s nuclear fleet. Rising from the countryside, the gleaming buildings looked like modern marvels, and the economic windfall lifted Paducah residents’ spirits. Meanwhile, employees at the plant—everyone from nuclear technicians to welders, cooks, and janitors—were united in patriotic pride. Their jobs paid well, and the workers believed that they were helping fend off communism. It was no wonder Life magazine printed a photo spread of the site.

As the Cold War thawed, the mission changed but the jobs remained. The plant began recycling materials—gold, among other things—extracted from dismantled atomic weapons while continuing to enrich uranium, now for nuclear power plants instead of bombs. Wages allowed families to buy homes and cars and afford vacations—the American middle-class dream. The plant operated like a self-contained town for its 1,700 employees: It had its own security force, fire department, library, post office, and health clinic. A shuttle service ferried employees around the plant’s grounds. Workers participated in golf leagues and fishing tournaments. The Uranium Enrichment News kept everyone informed about goings-on at the site.

Though the plant was owned by the Department of Energy, it was run by contractors. Union Carbide initially oversaw operations, followed by Martin Marietta, which later merged with Lockheed to become Lockheed Martin. Management changed, but to employees that just meant a different name on their paychecks. The people on the ground were like family—fiercely loyal to one another and to the plant they called the Atomic City.

Fowler smiled as he drove through a security gate into a sprawling lot. He parked by the administrative building and checked in with a secretary, who called someone to escort him to his department. From there he would lead health and safety training sessions. The federal government had known as early as 1944 that radiation was hazardous and had issued policies to limit worker exposure. It was Fowler’s job to help ensure that regulations were enforced, to protect both employees and the surrounding community from contamination.

He had barely settled in when a coworker poked his head in.

“Want to see the place?”

The complex was huge—more than five hundred buildings connected by nearly twenty miles of access roads. Fowler was impressed until, as he rounded a corner on his tour, a yellow triangular sign with the radiation symbol caught his eye. There was no step-off pad in sight. In a nuclear facility, a step-off pad is a buffer zone between a hazardous area and a clean one. Workers at the Paducah site were supposed to remove radiation-tainted clothing and footwear before crossing through these zones to ensure they didn’t unwittingly transfer dangerous materials to other parts of the plant or transport it home with them.

Fowler flagged down a worker leaving the building where the warning sign was posted. “You don’t have a step-off pad down here,” Fowler said. The worker shrugged and said there was nothing to worry about.

“That sign says otherwise,” Fowler said. He explained that protocol required a pad and training for workers so they knew how to use it.

The worker’s expression was unchanged as he walked away.

Fowler’s pulse quickened as he imagined invisible particles on boot soles spreading throughout the plant or, worse, tracking onto kitchen floors or into rooms where children played. He hurried to his division manager’s office. The supervisor listened, then leaned back in his chair and tapped a pen on his desk calendar. He said he’d call a meeting about the issue.

That night at home, Fowler sat at the kitchen table watching Sandi cook. Normally, he’d have been joking with his wife about her limited culinary range—she often made breakfast for dinner—but tonight his mind was elsewhere. The sizzle from the stove filled the silence between them.

Sandi knew something was wrong. In the years since they first met at a bar in Joliet, Illinois, she’d become attuned to her husband’s moods. Despite his imposing frame—six foot two, 245 pounds—Fowler had always been the gentle sort and quick to laugh. Their courtship progressed quickly, and within four months of meeting Fowler had moved in to her family’s home in Aurora. They married there so her father, a former school principal paralyzed from a stroke, could attend.

“What is it, Ron?” Sandi asked, spatula in hand.

He sighed. “Something’s not right at work.”

“What do you mean?”

“The way they treat radiation—like it can’t hurt them. No precautions,” Fowler said.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Sandi replied, frowning.

“I know.” Fowler shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Uranium is a silvery-white radioactive metal. More than 99 percent of it found in nature is U-238, and the rest is U-235, an isotope that can sustain the chain reactions needed to fuel nuclear power production and atomic weapons. Enrichment is the process of increasing the concentration of U-235 in a supply of uranium. At different points, enrichment produces one powder Paducah workers called black oxide—not to be confused with the coating of the same name applied to some metals to improve corrosion resistance—and another, uranium tetraflouride, that’s known as green salt. Eventually, uranium hexafluoride, a colorless crystalline solid, is heated into a gas that’s pushed through microscopic porous barriers. This process, called gaseous diffusion, separates U-235 from U-238; at plants like the one in Paducah, it’s done hundreds of times in a cascade until the desired enrichment level is reached.

Uranium enrichment is hazardous business. Fowler knew that any leak, spill, or accident at the Paducah plant could damage kidneys and lungs, irritate skin, and increase cancer risk. More insidiously, simple mistakes or oversights by workers could have that same result. During his first few weeks on the job, Fowler explored the plant on his own, and what he found unsettled him. Employees worked in radioactive areas without protective suits or masks. Some couldn’t read and might not understand warning signs. People left the site after their shifts without changing clothes or showering, likely conveying radioactive dust home to their families. Some workers even warmed their lunch on top of machines in hazardous areas.

Fowler knew that things needed to change, and quickly. He took his concerns to the plant manager, Steve Polston, who heard him out and then called a meeting about step-off pads—the very issue Fowler had flagged on his first day. At the meeting, Fowler outlined the safety gaps he’d observed at the plant, but it seemed to him as though the senior managers in the room could barely feign interest. He heard what would become something of a refrain: “We’ve been doing it this way for years.” He was also told that Department of Energy officials visited the site regularly and hadn’t raised concerns.

More worried than ever, Fowler spent the next several months developing new safety protocols. He beamed with satisfaction as he handed the plan to Polston. In the period that followed, however, he became frustrated with how officials implemented the measures. Even when company-issued safety equipment was made available, Fowler noticed that much of it was obsolete. And he watched in disbelief as employees poked holes in respirator masks to smoke while working.

“I’m not making progress,” he told Sandi one night between sips from a can of Miller Lite. “No one is listening.” He likened his work to “scooping water out of the ocean.”

Sandi, who had studied his training manual to understand his work, gently touched his arm. “Be patient,” she suggested. “Maybe you just have to get to know the people better.”

Fowler’s shoulders dropped. “It seems like more than that,” he said.

In this edition: in a pickle; gut feeling; king of pain; life (or something like it); for those about to rock.

I was introduced to Kimon de Greef’s work this spring when I was producing our Longreads questionnaire with Patrick Radden Keefe. In his response to a question on the last book he read, Keefe mentioned de Greef’s “totally wild” book called The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. I immediately googled it and requested a copy. With a title like that, how could you not?

The Ego Trip, which will be released on August 4, expands on the story de Greef explored in his 2022 New Yorker feature, “The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads.” It’s as fascinating as the title promises: a deeply reported book on the rise and fall of a Mexican doctor who built a psychedelic movement around smoking the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.

De Greef’s other stories are just as compulsively readable, dropping us into worlds that most of us have never even thought about and introducing us to memorable characters: There’s a Syrian immigrant trapper in New York who communicates with raccoons and refuses to kill them, and a Guyanese importer trying to do right in a world of songbird smuggling. There’s a Native American woman unable to harvest wild white sage on Southern California land stripped bare by poachers, and miners searching for leftover gold in South Africa’s illegal mines.

What ties this reporting together is de Greef’s eye for complex stories in offbeat industries and underworlds, and his interest in the tensions between desire and regulation, love and exploitation. A journalist from South Africa, de Greef also co-authored the book Poacher, a firsthand account on the illicit abalone trade.

Next week, we’ll have an excerpt from The Ego Trip for you. In the meantime, dive into de Greef’s questionnaire and get to know the author behind the book.

—Cheri Lucas Rowlands

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Where did you grow up?

I was born in London and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa.

What places feel like home?

My parents returned to South Africa when I was 1. We lived in a neighborhood called Observatory. I moved back here to live in a student house in my early 20s, and a few years ago I returned for a third time with my wife, who I met here too. At this point I might be in Obs forever.

Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?

I studied ecology at university and gained an appreciation for the wonder of evolutionary biology—the idea, essentially, that all life is connected, both in the present and backward through deep time to a common ancestor. It blows my mind whenever I think of it. I later researched abalone poaching for a master’s thesis and it changed how I thought about history, politics, and the law. Since then I’ve often gravitated to stories where inequality and crime intersect with the natural environment.

What is your favorite time of day?

Currently it’s when my baby daughter wakes up early in the morning and I get to hang out with her.

What are you really good at?

Catching flies with my bare hands.

What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?

A wet suit from my family when I was 10. They buried it on the beach and my uncle Cleon pretended to discover it. I started bodyboarding afterward and it changed my life in many ways.

Describe your favorite meal.

My late grandmother Vonni’s chicken guvetsi, a Greek dish made with orzo noodles. It’s been my favorite since before I can remember.

Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)

I wish I could write in silence but my office is on a busy street and I’m unusually sensitive to noise, so I use noise-canceling headphones. These days I’ve been alternating between ambient music and progressive psytrance—it felt appropriate for the book.

Where do you do your best thinking?

Often while free-writing longhand (I should do that more often) or after a swim.

What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?

I developed chronic foot pain in my late 20s. While I was recovering, I got an assignment from Audubon magazine to report on a conservation initiative deep in the rainforests of Madagascar. We would be hiking most of the way there. I was close to broke and badly needed the work. To get out, I walked something like 20 miles in a day. It was grueling but I made it through, and for whatever reason my freelance career seemed to gather momentum afterward.

Where do you like to read?

In bed early at night before falling asleep.

What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?

I started reporting a story about toad poaching in 2020 and imagined it would be 2,500 words or so. That one pulled me in pretty deep.

Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.

The New Yorker. Harper’s for its distinctive sensibility and offbeat stories that nobody else would publish. I’ve also been enjoying the new magazine Now Voyager.

What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?

“The Hunt For El Chapo” by Patrick Radden Keefe is a certain platonic ideal for me. Panoramic reporting and a sense of effortless intimacy with material that’s notoriously difficult to source. Plus the writing is incredibly smooth.

What was the last book you read?

I just finished Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. I had read the title story but not the final one, about a young man’s summer job in a logging camp. It’s so singular in tone and so richly observed and reminded me how beautiful and timeless writing can be. 

What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?

A story I did for The New Yorker about illicit gold mining in South Africa, something I’d wanted to write about for many years and am hoping to dig into further.

What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?

Jumping in the sea. Sitting in a sauna. Talking about it with my wife.

Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?

John Steinbeck, particularly Cannery Row. I enjoy his humor and character sketches, but most of all I love how he writes about animals and biology. 

What words do you overuse?

“Marginal,” “entrenched,” “booming,” “illicit.” Since writing about psychedelics, “radically” and “profoundly.”

What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?

At risk of sounding like an old man, watching archival cricket footage on Facebook.

What superpower would you like to have? 

The gift of easy sleep.

What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?

I appreciate the stoicism of donkeys and the playfulness of seals.

If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?

Go for a walk in the neighborhood or exchange growls with my daughter.

What five items would you place in a time capsule?

A cricket bat, a ball, the rules, and two wickets (should be more but we’re out of space) so that the game can be reconstituted after the apocalypse.

What does your writing space look like?

After working from home for more than a decade, I now share an office with a documentary filmmaker just up the road from where I live. It has big windows and boxes of notes on the floor for my next book project and is upstairs from a good coffee shop, which is unfortunate because right now I’m not drinking caffeine.

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Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author of The Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads, published by Doubleday. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.

In this edition: loving a killer; GRASE under fire; the marvelous mundane; Texas on two wheels; and the man who would be T. rex king.

Pamela Colloff is an award-winning reporter at ProPublica and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine. 

She spoke with Brendan O’Meara, host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, about how she developed as a reporter and writer, using these skills to uncover the failures of the American criminal justice system. Colloff and O’Meara talk about preparing for interviews, how thoughtful reportage can effect real change, and learning from the perspectives of incarcerated and exonerated people.

Colloff’s first book, Catch the Devil, a deep dive into serial con man Paul Skalnik, is now available. 

This conversation has been edited for pacing and flow. 

—Krista Stevens

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Brendan: What do you make of the fact that regardless of how skilled, experienced, and accomplished you become as a writer, it’s still really, really hard? And yet writers put together amazing work that creates change, and if not change, at least true art that makes meaning.

Pamela: Every assignment, at the beginning? I’m sure this is the one that reveals I’m a failure, that I don’t know what I’m doing. This is the one that’s going to break me. There are different stages. There’s the elation after finding a great idea, and then despair because no one’s going to talk to you, and then elation when people talk to you. Then there’s despair because you have this amazing material, but you have no idea how to write it. It’s this endless roller coaster. It’s funny to have been doing this for so long and still have so much self-doubt. 

I remember asking Gary Cartwright [Ed: Cartwright wrote for Texas Monthly from 1975–2010.] about this after a particularly tough close on a story. This was in the late ’90s, early ’00s, and I was really struggling because it felt like every story took so much out of me. It still feels that way, quite honestly. And I sought him out and said something like, “Gosh, this is so hard. Does it get easier?” And he just laughed and he said, “When it gets easier, it’s time to hang it up.” I think what he was saying is that when the work gets boring, when you feel like you really know what you’re doing, then maybe you should move on to something else. I loved that, and it also gave me an appreciation. I think about this a lot now; I feel so lucky at this point in my career to be doing work that is endlessly challenging, like every story is a new Rubik’s Cube to figure out.

Brendan: When it comes to writing, there’s something called the Skip Hollandsworth Method. What is that method, and do you still employ it? 

Pamela: He read a draft of mine. I couldn’t tell you which story. His rewriting instruction was to take all the quotes out, and once I had taken the quotes out, to revise it. And once I had revised it, then decide which quotes to put back in. He said, “You’ve got to do a draft where the only voice that’s there is yours.” It was such good advice because in that particular story (and I think this happens in stories where I’m having more difficulty), I was leaning really hard on quotes. He was telling me to figure out what the story was saying. You have to tell the story, and then thoughtfully choose where you need someone else’s voice and judiciously put that back in. It might also have been referring to Skip’s theory of interviewing. My inclination is to over-research everything before I arrive at the interview, to show the person that I’m knowledgeable. I have to earn their respect. Skip would show up to an interview and say, “Wow, so what’s podcasting? How do you do it?” Just the most broad questions imaginable. He got great material just coming to people totally fresh. He’d done his homework, and if he needed to follow up with something specific, he could. But I think there’s something to that. I’m really working on coming in and trying to leave a lot of space for the person I’m interviewing instead of showing them how much work I’ve done.

Brendan: You need to get them talking and get into their headspace, and it helps to have that baseball card knowledge. But the whole idea is to get them talking.

Pamela: I will make my list of questions, which is usually absurdly detailed and many pages long, and I’ll spend a lot of time working on that. I put it away when I get to the interview. Of course the work that went into it is informing the conversation, but I just try to have a normal conversation for as long as I possibly can. And it’s not until we’re going to shift gears and I’m trying to remember the things I haven’t asked that I pull out my notes. I used to be embarrassed about looking at my notes. I don’t know why I used to be so self-conscious about that.

Brendan: I loved that you brought up Skip’s tip on removing the quotes, and then having the confidence with your authority over the material, and then cherry-picking the right ones. You need to take agency and shape the piece in your own voice. 

Pamela: Before I have the confidence to write in the way that I want to write, where I really own the material, I have to spend so much time with people. At the outset, once I outline what it’s going to involve after they say yes to talking to me, I’ll say, “I’m going to be around a lot and you’re going to get sick of me at some point.” To be clear, it’s not always in person. I just finished a story where much was done by phone and Zoom and text, but I was in constant communication with my sources for about six weeks, throughout the day, every day, in various ways. For me it’s spending enough time with people that I feel like I have the right to describe what I’m describing in a story, and to tell their story in a somewhat omniscient way, that their voice comes in when they say something unique in the way that they phrased it, or makes you suck in your breath. 

Brendan: There’s your book, and the long stories you’ve written. There are false starts, stories that don’t get off the ground. Coming up with ideas is paramount. Ideas are your currency. How do you generate the story ideas that you know that you’ll run with, be it for ProPublica, The New York Times, or even a book?

Pamela: When I started at Texas Monthly at 25, again having no idea what I was doing, we had a monthly staff meeting with everyone who worked at the magazine. Before the meeting, each writer had to submit five fully developed story ideas. Not just “Hey, it would be cool if we wrote about this.” You had made some calls, or had done some real research, and you had them fleshed out. It was coming up with five viable ideas, so you had to come up with 20 ideas to get down to five, and then you had to flesh them out, and you had to write them up, and they were put in a packet that was distributed to everyone. You would get called on. If the editor in chief liked an idea on your page, you would get called on to talk about it. To pull that off every month, you’re looking for story ideas every second of every day. There’s nothing that is not fodder. There is no conversation that is not something that might lead to a story idea. I felt like it made me. I was already a curious person, but it made me talk to anyone and everyone and ask them more about their lives. So that was really good training. And it’s an exercise, a muscle you build over time. 

So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it.

Brendan: In your work for The New York Times, but also in Catch the Devil,  there are men on death row, and they hear guards stomping and keys jingling, and they’re wondering if they’ll be taken to death watch. It’s chilling to hear that and you put us in their headspace. It’s incredibly moving and pulses with a kind of terror that you feel for them, no matter what they may have done.

Pamela: So much of what I write about is dark and intense. The people I get to spend time with to tell these stories? I feel like my life is a lot richer with them in it. I always think about the perspective that I have as someone who spends a lot of time talking to people who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, the things they long for, or the things that they savor when they have the chance to get them. I’m thinking in particular of one exoneree who I’ve spent a lot of time with. The way that they described just the most ordinary things. Anthony Graves had been on Texas’s death row and was freed. He talked about what it was like to go into a grocery store after you’ve been in solitary for years, and all the colors and textures and smells and the way light falls on different things. The way he talked about going to the grocery store was like how one of us might talk about going to see the greatest work of art we’ve ever seen. The way these men talk about the food they long for or putting their feet in the grass, things like that. I’m lucky to have that perspective. 

Another thing is the potential for writing to change things. Some stories I’ve written made things happen in the world, and that is the greatest feeling there is. And then there are other stories that haven’t done that, but they have put a light on people who really needed that light on them. They’ve highlighted something important to make readers think more deeply, or maybe focused on people working in the trenches where no one’s paying attention, but what they’re doing is so important.

Listen to the full conversation below.