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The Longform Episodes We Won’t Forget
With the long-running journalism podcast coming to an end, we asked media people to tell us the episodes they can’t get out of their heads.
97, Ta-Nehisi Coates on “ The Case for Reparations.” For me, that episode’s discussion of craft and of the expectations of writing for and about Black people was one of the main inspirations that drove me to consider working as a journalist full time. First is the gobsmackingly great critic Margo Jefferson, who left the Times a couple of years before I arrived, and whose allergy to received (and comfortable) wisdom, I learned during this episode, was as pure in speech as in writing, and delivered with a calm verging on nervy. I remember being on the BART, sophomore year of college, listening to early episodes with Elizabeth Gilbert and Ariel Levy, completely enthralled and moved by the vulnerability of the tape.
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