Episode 521: Jonah Weiner

Longform

Education, Arts, Books, News

4.7 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and co-author of the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. “It's a version of myself. It's a hyperbolic version of myself. And I think it keeps it fun for me. It doesn't feel like a job. Ideally, it keeps it fun for readers. And I think that there actually is this function where X out of 10 people coming to it, their eyes are going to cross and they're going say, I'm out. No thanks. And that's fine, because the Y out of 10 who stick around feel that much more in on something and it just makes it feel like a funky, special place.” Show notes: @jonahweiner jonahweiner.com Weiner on Longform 00:00 Weiner on Longform Podcast 01:00 "Prying Eyes" (New Yorker • Oct 2012) 01:00 Blackbird Spyplane (Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie • Substack) 06:00 "Don’t Take This Hunk at Face Value" (New York Times • Mar 2011) 11:00 "Michael Mann’s Damaged Men" (New York Times Magazine • Jul 2022) 23:00 "Wonders of Tokyo" (Blackbird Spyplane • Nov 2022) 23:00 "It’s-a me, Tokyo!" (Blackbird Spyplane • Nov 2022) 25:00 "Blackpilled Swag" (Blackbird Spyplane • Jan 2023) 31:00 The Warning with Steve Schmidt (Steve Schmidt • Substack) 33:00 Weiner's Rolling Stone archive 34:00 Racket (Matt Taibbi • Substack) 34:00 Glenn Greenwald (Glenn Greenwald • Substack) 36:00 "Bob Odenkirk’s Long Road to Serious Success" (New York Times Magazine • Feb 2022) 36:00 "Seth Rogan and the Secret to Happiness" (New York Times Magazine • Apr 2021) 37:00 The “Blackbird Spyplane” Interview Archive Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to the Longform Podcast. I'm Aaron Lammer. I'm here with my co-host, Evan
0:15.9	Ratliffe and Max Linsky, who I can't see, but I trust that I remember what you look
0:20.7	like. Hello, Aaron. Aaron, we're always by your side. We'll never leave.
0:25.5	I can tell you exactly how long you've been by my side, because the guest for this week's
0:31.0	show was on Longform Podcast number 15. He is now back. His name is Yikes. Yeah. I was
0:40.8	like looking it up when I went to email him, and then I had to pause for like two weeks
0:46.5	to consider the fact that there's a person who was on the show over 10 years ago, just
0:51.3	to ponder your own mortality. Just to ponder my own mortality, but he's doing something
0:55.8	quite different now than he was then. So the guest is Jonah Weiner. He was previously
1:02.4	a journalist, probably most notably, for The New York Times Magazine. He wrote a story
1:07.4	that's always really struck with me about this artist Trevor Paglin, who like takes photos
1:13.1	of secret military bases. Anyway, in a career pivot while still doing that kind of writing,
1:20.7	he runs a newsletter, which I really enjoy, called Blackbird Spyplane. It is ostensibly
1:27.6	about clothes, fashion, but it's a lot more than that. It's also about culture. It's written
1:34.6	in a very unique voice, and I think approaches the idea of a community around a newsletter
1:42.5	quite uniquely. And he's also someone I wanted to have on because he's built a real business
1:48.2	around this. He has invested a lot of life in it. And I think he's taken a different
1:53.9	path, maybe than some other writers who've moved over from magazine writing to sub-stack
1:59.6	and how he approaches it. So great conversation.
2:02.2	Well, Aaron, anytime you use the phrase, invested a lot of life into it, I know that it's
2:08.2	a thing that you're passionate about. That's a metric by which you look at the world.
2:12.1	Did they invest their life into it? So I'm looking forward to this one. It's a call back
	...

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