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Episode 443: Jared Sullivan and the Subtle Art of the Cold Call

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By Brendan O’Meara

Jared Sullivan is here. https://jared-sullivan-kisp.squarespace.com/about

He is the author of Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe. It’s published by Knopf.

https://bookshop.org/book/9780593321119

Jared’s book has gotten a prime review in The New York Times and was one of those four featured books in a recent issue of The New Yorker. You know the Briefly Noted section toward the back. It doesn’t matter what issue. What matters is that it was THERE.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/books/review/valley-so-low-jared-sullivan.html

Episode 440: How to be a Truffle Pig with Kate McQueen

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By Brendan O’Meara

It’s that Atavistian time of the month, and we’ve got Kate McQueen on loan from the Pollen Initiative to talk about “The Good Traitor,” how a group of journalists in Nazi Germany sought to free one of their own from a concentration by means of … winning him the Nobel Peace Prize. Where do people find these stories?

Kate has a Ph.D. in literature from Stanford University and a master’s in journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She’s the editorial director of the Pollen Initiative, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to cultivating media centers inside prisons across the country.”

Episode 436: Mira Ptacin and the Story of How One Town Drove Out a Nazi

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By Brendan O’Meara

It’s that Atavistian time of the month and Mira Ptacin (@miramptacin) is here! She is a writer, journalist, teacher, and did you see that sweater in her pic? Her story for The Atavist Magazine, “The Crash of the Hammer,” details how one town in rural Maine ran a new-Nazi (Christopher Polhaus, aka Hammer) out of town.

The crux of the piece is this notion of the paradox of tolerance. When you become tolerant of intolerant people (because tolerance) you invite the conditions for greater intolerance. Tolerating intolerance ultimately squashes out tolerance. Hence the paradox.

Episode 432: Betsy Golden Kellem, Scholar of the Unusual, Closet Historian, Atavist Writer

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By Brendan O’Meara

Betsy Golden Kellem (@bgkellem) is an attorney, a historian, and a “scholar of the unusual.”

Her piece, “City on Fire,” chronicles “the night violent anti-government conspirators sowed chaos in the heart of Manhattan” … in 1864. It’s a wild piece that shows how history has a way of feeling very fresh.

Episode 426: Asking for Blurbs, Unauthorized Biographies, and the Mystery of Aaron Rodgers with Ian O’Connor

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By Brendan O’Meara

Ian O’Connor is a modern-day master of the sports biography, the unauthorized sports biography. Unauthorized is not a dirty word, though the industry needs to rebrand around it. We’ll workshop that …

Unauthorized = true journalism, no editorial input from the central figure, more likely closer to the truth instead of the central figure’s truth. It is not a collaboration.

This is the biography you want to read.

And in the hands of someone like Ian, there’s no better reader experience. Ian handled his latest mammoth figure in Out of the Darkness: The Mystery of Aaron Rodgers (Mariner Books) with utmost fairness and showed the grayness of Rodgers’s character, which makes for a gripping and complicated read.

Episode 414: John Rosengren on Cuts, Note Taking, and Darkness for The Atavist

Photo credit: Scott Streble

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By Brendan O’Meara

It’s that Atavistian time of the month and, boy, is “Anatomy of a Murder” a dark one. Brilliant, but bleak.

John Rosengren is the reporter behind this gripping story of how a vigilante murder divided a town. The story couldn’t be in better hands than John’s.

He is the author of twelve books including The Greatest Summer in Baseball History, Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid, as well as the novel A Clean Heart.

Episode 409: Chain Smoking Book Projects with Earl Swift

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By Brendan O’Meara

Earl Swift is our guest for Ep. 409. He is the author of more books than you have fingers including The Big Roads, Chesapeake Requiem, Across the Airless Wilds, and his most recent book Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery. It’s published by Mariner Books.

Just when you think this country couldn’t find a way to let you down, well, just give it some time. In the spirt of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Earl found a troubling story in its wicked cruelty, of a farmer, John S. Williams, who murdered 11 Black laborers rather than face charges for peonage. Earl expands on what this is in the book and in this conversation.

It got me thinking about the hidden histories of this country, atrocities and tragedies buried by the past. And it’s the serendipity of finding reference to these stories — research by catch — that people Earl can then expand and illuminate. Man, what a book.

Episode 405: Hallie Lieberman and the Drawer of Dead Pitches

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By Brendan O’Meara

Hallie Lieberman (@hallielieberman) has now written for The Atavist Magazine twice, her latest chronicling the crimes of “The Handcuff Man” in her “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

Hallie writes a lot about the sex industry and LBGTQ+ issues. She’s also the author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy.

This conversation was a trip. Hallie is a force of nature, candid, and joy to speak with and, I hope, a joy for you to listen to.

In this episode we talk about the draw of dead pitches, rejection, perseverance, and how to find wills.

Now in Paperback: Howard Bryant says ‘Everybody Gets Forgotten’

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This episode originally aired on June 10, 2022 as Episode 320.

By Brendan O’Meara

What a great interview to re-up. Tremendous insights into the craft of biography and the perfect way to lobby subjects about what it’s important for a credible journalist to tell their stories: Everybody gets forgotten. They might not thinks so, but it’s true. And Howard made that case to Rickey Henderson for Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original.

Howard is the author of several books including The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, The Heritage: Black Athletes, a Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, and Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston.

Episode 395: “The Six,” Mini-Deadlines and the Twang with Loren Grush

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By Brendan O’Meara

Hey, look! It’s Loren Grush (@grushcrush)! She’s a space journalist and author of The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts (Scribner Book Company).

This was a fun chat about:

Centering women in space
Setting mini-deadlines
The Vomit Comet
And what the hell is the “twang”?