What is surprising, is it your celebrity crush, knocking on your front door?

Oh, hiya!

Is it barbecuing and not burning the sausages?

Is it realising your cat has more friends than you?

Or is it finding hit animals like Goran Lagan, Cowboy, B-Bop and Tokyo ghoul to stream free on ITVX?

You be the judge, ITVX, the UK's freshest streaming service.

Hello and welcome to the Longform Podcast. I am your co-host, Aaron Lammer.

This week we are running a rerun I was told by my manager Max Linsky that I should pick one

of my favourite interviews that I've done over the last few years, so I picked this one.

It's with Nicholson Baker. I first came across Nicholson Baker through his novels like The Mezzanine,

but I had him on to talk about a non-fiction book he wrote, basically examining whether chemical

weapons had been used in the Korean War as the American troops retreated. This happened to coincide

with a lot of stuff that was happening around the possibility that the coronavirus or COVID-19

rather had emerged from a lab in Wuhan, which is not a topic that I have a particular opinion on,

but Nicholson had some things to say about it. Later, I noticed that he wrote a cover story

for New York Magazine, which I thought was an incredible piece of serendipity after this podcast,

but I later found out that the article was actually commissioned by someone who had heard him

talking about it on this podcast. I love it when this show can manifest actual writing out in the

universe, so that's why I'm picking this rerun me with Nicholson Baker.

Welcome, Nicholson Baker. Well, thank you, Aaron Lammer. I am so happy to be on your show.

When I read your first book, the mezzanine is your first book, is that right? That's my first book,

yeah. I read it when I was in college in a fiction course. That's nice. What was it?

...