Hello and welcome to the long form podcast. I am Evan Ratliffe. I am one of your co-hosts. I'm joined by Max Linsky just Max and I today. Hey, Max, how are you?

I'm good, man. I miss Aaron. I doesn't feel like, um, doesn't feel the same without him. He'll be back. He'll be back next week. It's going to be having back next week.

We'll have ease. He's invited back. He's invited back. Who did you invite on the program this week, Evan?

This week I invited Sarah Topal, who is a reporter and writer. She's currently a writer at large for the New York Times magazine.

She's written long features for Harper's for Buzzfeed News, GQ, the Atlantic. She generally does this kind of time intensive, incredibly up close reporting on

some of the most difficult international subjects, including several that we talked about along the way in our conversation, the Rohingya genocide, child soldiers in Nigeria, arms trafficking in Libya, ethnic cleansing in China.

Her most recent story for the Times magazine from August is about a woman in Taiwan, Nancy, who participated in the Hong Kong protests and then helped Hong Kongers try and flee the country during the ensuing government crackdown.

So she covers a pretty wide swath of the world and she finds these characters to sort of portray these very difficult subjects through and I've wanted to talk to her for a long time about how she does it.

I will say she's not the kind of reporter who generally centers herself in these stories or even talks that much about her work in interviews.

So it was a real privilege to have her on to do so here and I personally got a lot out of this conversation and I think a lot of listeners will too.

I'm so glad she's on the show. I feel like her byline has gotten to this place now where when I see it, I just like stop what I'm doing and read the piece and every time I come away with it being just like, how did she do that?

How did she get in there? How did she find these people? How did she do this work? So I feel like these questions will be answered.

Yeah, we got into it. We got into a new relationship with the fine people at Vox, long form podcast is now produced in partnership with Vox and turns out we like them.

Quite nice people over there at Vox. Now here is Evan with Saratopoul.

So welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's really great to have you here. It's one of these situations where I started out thinking, oh, I want to talk about this story and then I started reading back and I was like, oh, I want to talk about this story.

I want to talk about this story and then I quickly exceeded the amount of time that we're going to have to talk about all your stories.

The stories that you've done over the past, let's say, few years, they just range all over the world. So the most recent one is about Hong Kong and Taiwan.

You've got the Rohingya genocide story that you did about the teacher who fled the ethnic cleansing. You've got the boys who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria.

You've got a weaker family that was torn apart by ethnic cleansing, a political murder in the Ukraine, sex and gender story in the Dominican Republic, going back further, Libya, Russia.

So I am very interested in how you conceive these stories and how you find them. Let's start first with the most recent story about Taiwan. Maybe you can just describe a little bit about what the story is about.

The story is about a young Taiwanese woman who gets caught up in the protests in Hong Kong after visiting there and making friends with some of the members of the Hong Kong opposition and her attempts to bring them to Taiwan and help them settle in there.

And as she goes through this kind of political awakening, she starts to think about her own country's future and what it means to be up against an encroaching Beijing.

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