An Ode To The Obit w/ Don Van Natta and Jacob Feldman
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2023
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As it happens, the This Day team has a bunch of cool new projects coming out over the next week or two. So, we’re going to feature them here.
Today: Our producer and researcher Jacob Feldman is also one of the co-writers of the excellent Sunday Long Reads newsletter. They just launched a podcast series about the art of the obituary. Jacob is joined by Don Van Natta to talk about Ronald Reagan’s obit and what they learned about the artform.
Subscribe to the SLR and check out the podcast series here: https://sundaylongread.com/
Sign up for our newsletter! We’ll be sending out links to all the stuff we recommended later this week.
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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia. |
| 0:07.0 | My name is Jody Averkin. |
| 0:09.0 | We're in the middle of a stretch of episodes highlighting some of the cool work that the |
| 0:15.7 | this day team has been involved in. It's under our very strict policy of if you write a book or make |
| 0:20.6 | a podcast or otherwise have a big new project you get an episode of the show |
| 0:24.7 | so today let's talk about the art of the obituary because that is the subject of a new |
| 0:30.3 | podcast series produced by our researcher and producer Jacob Feldman. |
| 0:34.2 | It comes from the Sunday Long read, a newsletter that Jacob writes |
| 0:38.0 | featuring the best in long form journalism and other recommendations. |
| 0:42.4 | And the obituary might be a dark horse |
| 0:45.3 | candidate for the most interesting journalistic endeavor. There is so much you can |
| 0:49.3 | learn from a great obituary and so much that goes into writing a great obituary that is the |
| 0:54.8 | thrust of the new series from Jacob and he does it alongside the journalist Don Van Nada |
| 1:00.2 | investigative reporter for the New York Times and now senior reporter at |
| 1:03.2 | ESPN and book author and many many other great journalistic things. So Jacob and |
| 1:07.9 | Don welcome to this day. Thanks for, thanks for chatting and |
| 1:11.6 | congrats on this new series. Thanks Jody. Thanks Jody. |
| 1:14.0 | Thanks. We appreciate it. |
| 1:15.0 | Pleasure to be here on the other side of the mic. |
| 1:16.0 | Yes, I will say Jacob that I was thinking, you know, you've been on the other side of the |
| 1:20.0 | mic a few times, people have certainly known your name and have heard you a couple |
| 1:22.6 | times and I cannot believe Donna this is the first time that you've been on the show |
... |
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