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Episode 361: Ari Shapiro

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Ari Shapiro (@arishapiro) is the host of NPR’s All Things Considered. He’s covered presidents. He’s traveled all over the world. He sings with the band Pink Martini. Now he’s the author of The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening (HarperCollins).

It’s a great memoir and what amounts to a love letter to his craft, which is journalism. So in this conversation, we talk about how:

His kit is like scuba gear
He loves the impermanence of radio
He’s terrified of the permanence of books
Conversations can bridge divides
And much, much more

Episode 360: Elizabeth Gonzalez James

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By Brendan O’Meara

Elizabeth Gonzalez James (@unefemmejames) has a chapbook out called Five Conversations About Peter Sellers (Texas Review Press).

Here’s my favorite Peter Sellers scene from one of The Pink Panther movies.

Though Elizabeth’s chapbook makes no mention of The Pink Panther movies, she’s concerned with Sellers’ erratic behavior around the making of Casino Royale (no, not the James Bond reboot starring Daniel Craig). No, this Casino Royale gave inspiration to … Austin Powers.

Episode 358: Erica J. Berry

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By Brendan O’Meara

Look who’s back! It’s Erica J. Berry (@ericajberry) and she’s here to talk about Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron Books).

Erica came on the show back in 2017 (I shudder to think of the audio) and it’s worth revisiting, and it’s nice that nearly six years later her work has evolved so greatly that we now get to talk about her magnificent book.

In this episode, we talk about:

Episode 357: Adam Popescu

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By Brendan O’Meara

Los Angeles-based journalist and writer Adam Popescu (@adampopescu) is here! He visited Congo and wrote about how Virunga, its national park, is the first of its kind to mine Bitcoin.

This piece is the intersection of his taste. Check this from his website:

He specializes in narratives on power, culture, wildlife, climate, and the dark side of big tech.

Episode 356: Siku Allooloo

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By Brendan O’Meara

Siku Allooloo (@discobou) puts the “multi” in multi-hyphenate. She’s a writer, a poet, a filmmaker. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Briarpatch Magazine, and Canadian Art Magazine, among others.

In this episode, we talk about the essay “Caribou People,” which appeared in the collection Shapes of Native Nonfiction (University of Washington). We also talk about “Living Death,” which won a creative nonfiction prize for Briarpatch Magazine.

These essays rhyme in dealing with patching together ancestral holes and colonial trauma. This is a very illuminating conversation from a great thinker.

Episode 355: Flinder Boyd

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By Brendan O’Meara

Ten years.

Ten years since “20 Minutes at Rucker Park” by Flinder Boyd (@FlinderBoyd) for SB Nation Longform for the incomparable editor Glenn Stout.

It felt like a good time to knock on Flinder’s door and have a conversation about what the past ten years has been like for him and what the next ten might look like.

Episode 354: Nile Cappello

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By Brendan O’Meara

Nile Cappello (@liketheriver_) is back!

You might remember her from this:

Here’s a link to that story, “The Girl in the Picture.”

And she’s back, this time to talk about kidfluencer culture in “Crushed.” Brace yourself, CNFers, this one’s a doozie.

Episode 353: Isaac Fitzgerald

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By Brendan O’Meara

Are you holding onto a railing? OK, good, Isaac Fitzgerald (@IsaacFitzgerald) is here, CNFers! He’s the author of the incredible memoir-in-essays Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury).

Isaac is a frequent contributor on The Today Show, offering book recommendations to the masses. His CV has The Rumpus, McSweeney’s, BuzzFeed Books, among others. He’s also the author of How to be a Pirate, Pen and Ink, and Knives and Ink.

Episode 352: Lauren Fleshman

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By Brendan O’Meara

Blink and you might miss Lauren Fleshman (@laurenfleshman). She’s a champion runner and the author of Good for a Girl: A Woman Running in a Man’s World (Penguin Press).

Her new book explores how broken our athletics systems are as they relate to women. By overlaying the female experience over the man’s construct (speak nothing of trans athletes, which is whole other ball of wax for another day), Lauren unpacks what a disservice that is for young women.

Lauren can officially boast that her book is a New York Times best seller, which is pretty bad ass. She wrote the book herself without a ghost writer, so, mad props. And in this episode we talk about:

Episode 351: Leah Sottile

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By Brendan O’Meara

Not rare to have repeat guests, but somewhat rare to have them back so quickly, and what a treat! It’s Leah Sottile (@Leah_Sottile)! You might remember her from Ep. 322 when we talked about her book When the Moon Turns to Blood. You also might remember her from the podcast series Bundyville.

And she’s back with another killer podcast called Burn Wild, taking a look at far-left extremism, particularly the environmental movement of the 1990s with the Environmental Liberation Front.

It’s what I’ve come to expect from Leah: Deeply researched and thoroughly written, delivered in her pull-up-a-stool narration.