"I kinda hate it when people say writing is fun," says Jack Rodolico, author The Atavist original "The Blue Book Burglar."

Today we feature Jack Rodolico, who is a bit of an audio maven, but he comes to us hot off the Atavist presses to talk about "The Blue Book Burglar: The Social Register was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful— the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of Mayflower passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief."

It’s a fun, rollicking read, not too heavy, not really heavy at all, merely a great caper.

Batting leadoff is lead editor Jonah Ogles, so we talk about his side of the table about what less experienced writers can learn about pitching the Atavist and how Jonah worked with Jack to fix the structure of the piece. As always, really rich stuff from the editing side of things.

A bit more about Jack Rodolico, the dude’s got it going on … His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, NPR, 99% Invisible, and NHPR … He’s earning an MFA in fiction, and that’s really helping him with his nonfiction writing, as you’ll hear in a moment.

You can learn more about Jack at his website journalistjack.com. In this conversation we talk about his Atavist piece, writing fiction, earning trust, why you can’t pay sources for information, how he organizes his research and cites his work, beginnings and endings, and how he didn’t necessarily want to be a journalist, rather he wanted to be a writer.

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“So much misery. It is so much misery. It is so hard. It's not natural, locking yourself in your room for three years to focus on one person is not mentally healthy. Leigh Montville, great, great writer, said to me years ago, he's like, ‘It's an unnatural thing. You spend two years in a hole to come out for two weeks, you know?’” — Jeff Pearlman, author of Only God Can Judge Me.

Today we have Jeff Pearlman returning to the show to talk about his 11th book, his latest book, Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur (Mariner Books). Jeff has made a career out of being a sports writer, so when I heard he had turned his biographical eye toward a hiphop icon from the 1990s, I was especially intrigued by how he would approach it. It’s the kind of book he could pursue after having proved himself ten times before, with a few of his books becoming coveted NYT bestsellers. He interviewed close to 700 people for the book … that’s how you do this. THAT is how it’s done.

The first time he was on, I think I annoyed him a bit with my questions on “craft.” He kind of bristled at the idea that it was a “craft,” which maybe he thought was too cute a word to put on it. To him, it’s fucking work. You make all the calls. Then you make more. You go to the locations. You knock on doors. You report, report, report. It has more to do with tenacity and rigor than art … so I made sure I steered clear of things that felt too crafty this time around.

Jeff is all over the place. By that I mean he’s got a YouTube presence with The Press Box Chronicles, a TikTok presence with more than 300,000 followers. He has a podcast, Two Writers Slinging Yang (still waiting for my invite), a political Substack called The Truth OC, and his writing/journalism Substack The Yang Yang. He’s a writer in his 50s and he’s tremendously nimble. He understands, even with his platform and profile, that nobody is going to champion your book like you can. Honestly, we can all take a page out of his book and how he has embraced the ever-changing playbook for book promotion.

In this conversation Jeff and I talk about:

• Book promotion
• Finding the little guys
• How he handled another Tupac biography publishing during his research for this book
• The misery of it all
• Conversations he had with Jonathan Eig, the PP winning author of King: A Life
• Jeff’s favorite “version” of Tupac
• And hitting the “fuck-it” stage.

All great stuff, as you might come to expect from speaking to Jeff Pearlman. His audio was a bit muddy. It’s not as great as I would have liked but I think the message carries the day.

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Show notes: brendanomeara.com

"When I came in [to Longreads], I didn't come in and say, I think we need to grow aggressively. I said, 'Let's figure out who we are. Let's figure out what other people aren't doing, that we do , and that we can do better.' And so the only real thing that changed when I first came in was to try to make the editors known quantities," says Peter Rubin, head of publishing at Automattic, where he works primarily with Longreads, but also The Atavist Magazine.

Today we have Peter Rubin. He’s on the pod to talk about a lot of things, but he’s also drumming up attention for a membership drive for longreads.com, a hub of curation for the best longreads on the web, first started by Mark Armstrong. Longreads has since gone onto publish original works of criticism, journalism, and personal essays and won a National Magazine Award for best digital illustration in 2020. In conjunction with with Oregon Public Broadcasting, they produced Bundyville, the hit podcast that made Leah Sottile something of a household name (shoutout to her new season of Hush).

He spent many years at Wired Magazine and he’s also the author of Future Presence: How Virtual Reality is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life, which came out in 2018, but with Chat GPT going full porn for verified adult users (what could possibly go wrong?), Peter’s book seems oddly of the moment … also it’s only seven years old, but I guess in tech that’s like the stone age.

You can learn more about Peter from his very stripped down website ptrrbn.com, yeah, he hates vowels, don’t come at him with vowels, or on the gram @provenself.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Finding diamonds in the rough
• How he cultivated his editor eye
• Being merciless in the edit
• Figuring out the new identity of Longreads when he took over in 2021
• Curation
• And the Longreads membership drive

Visit longreads.com to read more and to pony up … that’s what I’m going to do, for you people who think I get handouts, just know that I’m not that savvy.

Order The Front Runner

Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm

Welcome to Pitch Club

Show notes: brendanomeara.com