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Episode 260: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Pulitzer-winning author of "A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof"

Longform

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.71.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2018

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist. Her 2017 GQ piece “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof” won the National Magazine Award and the Pulitzer Prize. “I remember feeling like ‘you’re playing chess with evil, and you gotta win.’ Because this is the most terrible thing I’d ever seen. And I was so mad. I still get so mad. Words aren’t enough. I’m angry about it. I can’t do anything to Dylann Roof, physically, so this is what I could do.” Thanks to MailChimp, Read This Summer, and Netflix for sponsoring this week's episode. the-rachelkaadzighansah.tumblr.com Kaadzi Ghansah on Longform Longform Podcast #101: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah "A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof" (GQ • Aug 2017) [21:30] "America’s Most Political Food" (Lauren Collins • New Yorker • Apr 2017) [23:15] Light in August (William Faulkner • Random House • 1990) [43:30] "The Rise of the Valkyries" (Seyward Darby • Harper’s • Sep 2017) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all the money you invest.

0:25.0

This is a high-risk investment and you should not expect to be protected if something goes wrong. Hey, it's Max. I am all alone in the studio. Aaron Lammer is on vacation, Evan Ratliff, on vacation, and the show is also on vacation of sorts this week we are

0:47.5

rerunning a conversation that I had back in September of 2017 with the writer Rachel Kadesi Gansa.

0:55.4

Rachel had just published a story in GQ magazine called A Most American Terrorist

1:01.3

The Making of Delen Roof.

1:03.0

It's a story about the perpetrator of the Charleston

1:06.7

Church shooting.

1:08.4

And Rachel's story was one of those pieces.

1:11.1

For a couple of days there, it felt like it was the only

1:14.3

thing that the world was talking about and it was certainly the most powerful piece

1:21.0

that I read in 2017. It was at the top of our Best of 2017 list that

1:26.9

came out a few months later, a few months after that, it won the National Magazine Award

1:30.6

for Feature Writing, and a few months after that he won the Pulitzer.

1:35.2

The other thing that's worth knowing about this conversation, the other piece of context that

1:38.5

you should have is after the story was published and was generating all this conversation, Rachel was inundated with interview requests.

1:47.5

And she felt really strongly that the story spoke for itself, but after a couple of days,

...

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