Thomas Dworzak knows a war when he sees one. Growing up just six kilometers from Soviet territory in a small, Bavarian town was a defining element in his life. “There was a lot of fear of war, an invasion — the Russians coming,” the renowned, German conflict photographer tells Parker Molloy in tomorrow’s issue of Depth Perception. “It was the end of the world.”

These days, the Iron Curtain that cast such a shadow on his childhood has moved about 300 miles to the east, the Magnum Photos member notes. “But it’s coming up in a similar way.”

Border Line War, the latest collaboration between Long Lead and Magnum Photos, features Dworzak’s photography and harkens back to the dread of his Cold War youth and to where his career begin in the 1990s: the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It’s a photo-first feature that documents how for years Russia’s neighbors along its 4,750-mile border from Norway to Kazakhstan have held a tenuous line with the world’s largest country.

Dworzak began traveling these borderlands in 2023, looking for a different angle from which to view Russia’s war in Ukraine. Along the way he captured images of protests, performances, museums, and military trainings, all spurred to action by a ghost of an empire that insists it has no boundaries.

Border Line War reunites Dworzak with Christian Caryl, a fellow journalist he originally met in Moscow in the early 2000s. The first time the two partnered an assignment, they were to meet a fugitive Chechen commander in a secret location in Chechnya, Dworzak recalls. “All very cloak and dagger,” he says. “We ended up spending half a week hidden in a safe house, watching Soviet TV comedies, eating boiled sheep, and the commander never materialized.”

A former international opinions editor at The Washington Post, Caryl remembers crossing paths again with Dworzak again, years later, in Afghanistan where the Paris-based photographer had discovered an incredible hoard of images in an illicit photography studio. The cache eventually became Dworzak’s first book, Taliban, a collection of found (and garishly retouched) studio portraits of the militant fundamentalists who have oppressively ruled that country.

Accompanied by expert analysis from Caryl, currently a columnist with Foreign Policy, Border Line War is a travelogue and historical record that shows how countries from the Arctic, through the Baltics, and down into the Caucasus have pushed back against the menace next door.

“Europe has been working hard to shore up its borders against the possibility of Russian aggression,” Caryl writes. “But ‘drone walls,’ high-tech border installations, and troop reinforcements won’t suffice on their own when the foe can reach deep into the hearts of the nations trying to shelter behind the lines.”

Border Line War is a reunion of sorts for Caryl, too, who is backed by former Washington Post journalists Siobhán O’Grady (the piece’s editor), Lizzie Johnson (who handled its fact checking), and Vanessa Larson (its copyeditor), all recently departed from the storied newspaper.

Still stationed in the Ukrainian war zone where they were at the time of their recent Post layoffs, O’Grady and Johnson brought to the piece a first-hand understanding of what it’s like when the cold wind of Russian influence blows across this new Iron Curtain. At times they communicated with the Long Lead team via satellite internet and battery power, because the war in Ukraine had knocked out their power.

Long Lead is proud to have assembled this team of expert, independent, international journalists, all necessary to produce vital reporting in this moment of peak global anxiety. There may be hundreds of fewer Washington Post journalists than there were two months ago, but there’s more independent ones than ever — and Long Lead is here to support them.

Honor their efforts and expertise by reading Border Line War for free, today.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

Every year, thousands of twins pilgrimage to Twinsburg, Ohio, a charming spot that could double for any small American town. There, in the quaint town square, under big white tents and within each others’ embrace, pairs and sometimes trios of birthday-sharing siblings celebrate being the same, but different.

This year, photojournalist Sarah Rogers and filmmaker Kate Bennis made the trek, too. The result is showcased in the latest Long Lead feature, Double Meaning, which captures the annual Twins Days Festival through a collection of interviews, portraits, and a documentary short film.

“I’ve always wanted to go, but I don’t have a twin,” Kate tells Parker Molloy in tomorrow’s edition of Depth Perception (subscribe here). She grew up near Twinsburg, and Sarah’s maternal grandmother is a twin who was born in the town. Working together, the duo crafted a touching human interest feature that has lessons for everyone enduring the current climate of division.

Twins and multiples each have their own unique life experiences, yet the way their lives intertwine — like the double helix of DNA they share — can be beautiful and complex. Often congruent and complementary, relationships between bonded siblings can embody the famous Latin phrase, e pluribus unum: out of many one.

But as Double Meaning shows, twins’ lives aren’t always about having a built-in best friend. “Body dysmorphia, being constantly compared, and grief when you lose a twin and someone that you’ve spent your entire life with — those are all things that I didn’t know about before,” Sarah — who also serves as Long Lead’s creative director — explains in the Depth Perception interview.

Still, the benefits and drawbacks of always having a person seem to be a net positive. Though the reasons why are unknown, research has shown that twins generally live longer than “singletons” (which is what they call the rest of us). So what do twins and multiples know that the rest of us don’t?

Long Lead will share some of the twins’ experiences we couldn’t fit into the feature via our social media accounts, in particular our TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky feeds. Please subscribe and share the posts so more people can see what makes twins so special.

Watch the trailer for “Twins Fest” the documentary portion of Double Meaning here:

Three cheers! The Anthem Awards sing Long Lead’s praises

Long Lead is also excited to announce that our work has been honored with three 2025 Anthem Awards. The winning features are:

• The Age of Incarceration as a National Awareness Campaign for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion;

• Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet as a Podcast for Responsible Technology; and

• The Last Drops of Mexico City as News & Journalism for Sustainability, Environment & Climate.

Now in its fifth year, the Anthem Awards honor the purpose and mission-driven work of people, companies, and organizations worldwide. The awards amplify voices that spark global change and are a benchmark for social impact work.

Our goal at Long Lead is to produce journalism that is equal parts art and impact. This is the second consecutive year our features have been celebrated by the Anthem Awards. Last year, Home of the Brave took home two Anthem Awards and The Catch netted one.

Help Long Lead in its mission to promote what we call “journalism without compromise” by sharing our features online and off, and by telling people what you like about them. We’re leading the future of news, and by spreading the word, you’re a vital part of it.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

In September, the Signal Awards announced Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet was a finalist in three categories: Best History, Best Documentary, and Best Technology podcast. Yesterday the Signal Awards academy named the Long Lead-produced show a winner in all three!

Through the prior three seasons of Long Shadow, the Garrett Graff-helmed podcast had won five Signal Awards. Now with the honors given to Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, it has been cited for excellence eight times by Signal judges. To date, Long Shadow has won Signal Awards for Best History Podcast three times, Best Documentary Podcast twice, Best Editing, Best Public Service Podcast, and now with Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet, Best Technology Podcast.

Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?”

It’s the story of mankind’s greatest invention, a tool that gave everyone access to all the world’s information and unlocked democracy across the globe. But Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is also about the biggest crisis facing society today: how the web’s unlimited feed of data morphed into a firehose of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and lies that divided Americans over things we once agreed on, like science, diversity, and even democracy itself.

Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns across seven episodes, this limited series podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before. Featuring memes and moments you know — like when the world became transfixed by the color of a dress — and others you don’t, but should — like how people sent death threats to the woman who posted that meme online — Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet both scales the heights of internet virality and plumbs the depths of social media’s depravity.

In addition to winning eight Signal Awards, the Peabody Award-nominated show has also won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award and been honored by RFK Human Rights for public service and the Society of Professional Journalists for best narrative podcast. Its second season has also been included in the curriculum at the University of Houston and its third has been integrated into Harvard Law School’s program on the Second Amendment.

Across four seasons and through a series of riveting, complex narratives, Long Shadow makes sense of what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history, including Waco, Columbine, Y2K, 9/11, COVID-19, January 6, and beyond.

Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist historian, author, and journalist Garrett Graff, the podcast has been called “rigorous, authoritative, and an electrifying listen” by the Financial Times and honored as one of the year’s best podcasts by The Atlantic, Audible, Mashable, and The Week.

If you haven’t listened to Long Shadow yet, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

The amount of wrangling and shaping it takes to develop a podcast can be overwhelming. Sorting through hours, if not days, of recorded interviews. Sifting through vast, disorganized databases of archival sound. Reviewing countless research documents often spread across both digital and paper files. The brainstorming. The planning. The interview scheduling. Then there’s the near endless options for music and sound effects. It’s not a job for everyone, but for Ryan Sweikert, it’s a perfect fit.

Despite producing some of the most gripping nonfiction podcasts around, Sweikert got his start as a fiction writer in college. That changed in 2016 when he attended the Transom Story Workshop, a nine-week program that trained some of the audio world’s most sought-after producers until it went on hiatus in 2019.

The throughline between fiction and audio work? “Story structure,” says Sweikert. “For me, writing fiction is about being really specific about what you want to include and exclude in a story. That still informs what I do with podcasts. Obviously it’s different when you’re dealing with real people and real interviews. It makes it harder, but I prefer it that way.”

Long Lead

Periodic updates on Long Lead's in-depth journalism.

Sweikert has produced two seasons of the award-winning, Long Lead-produced, history podcast Long Shadow, hosted by Pulitzer finalist and investigative reporter Garrett Graff. Sweikert came to the show in its second season in 2022 as a senior producer with Campside Media, which handled production on the still-relevant Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right. After a season three sabbatical, Sweikert returned to work with Long Lead on the podcast’s fourth season, Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet.

Connecting the dots between the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas and the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right accomplishes what other media and politicians couldn’t. It provides both cause and context for America’s current moment and Donald Trump’s second administration. It also won coveted accolades, including the 2024 National Edward R. Murrow Award honoring outstanding achievements in broadcast and digital journalism.

Long Shadow’s fourth season takes on an equally ambitious topic: How the internet, which started out as the ultimate connector turned into anything but. Here Sweikert discusses his work, the process of creating the fourth season of Long Shadow, and what exactly goes into being a podcast producer. —Jenna Schnuer

Signaling Excellence: Vote for Long Shadow in the Signal Awards

Through three seasons of Long Shadow, the podcast has won five Signal Awards. With the release of season four, a sixth Signal would be good — but eight would be great.

Last week the Signal Awards announced that Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is a finalist in three categories. And now through October 9, listeners can propel the show to titles by voting for the podcast here:

• Vote for Long Shadow for Best Technology Podcast

• Vote for Long Shadow for Best History Podcast

• Vote for Long Shadow for Best Documentary Podcast

Check back in on October 15, when winners of the Signal Awards will be announced, and catch up on Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet wherever you get your podcasts.

Let’s get right to one of the great questions of our time: What does a podcast producer actually do?

On this project, it was really a little bit of everything and just keeping all the trains running on time. That starts with setting the production schedule, finding sources, sourcing a ton of archival material — which we find all over the internet — prepping for the interviews, and conducting the interviews.

We split the interviews pretty much in half. So Garrett will ask his questions and I’ll ask mine, about an hour each. Sometimes, for smaller sources, I’m tracking them down and reaching out to them and interviewing them, and just doing it all. But for the bigger interviews, the two of us sit in on those.

Then we have big editorial meetings to lay out the season and think about how these episodes connect. The big thing I was pushing this time was focus and throughline. We did that really well in season two because it was something that Garrett had been thinking about and had already outlined, so it was really clear from the get go. This season with the internet, it was not that clear at all when we started.

Then I put the episodes together entirely by myself. I scored them with music. I did some sound design.

What worried you most when you started working on Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet?

I remember telling people early in the process that I was doing a show about the internet, and they were just like, “[The entire internet?] OK.” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, I know.”

Then I think there was some worry about making it too dark. Of course, it does end in a dark place, because we’re in a dark place right now. But I think we were able to strike a balance, at least in the earlier episodes, with hopeful moments for the internet and funny moments and all those things.

How did the show evolve from the basic idea of how the internet changed over time into the final seven-part series?

It’s just a lot of shaping. These are all topics we wanted to hit including Y2K, the election of Barack Obama, and the Arab Spring. My job then is to find people to tell those stories through. That’s the major part of the process, figuring out not only how do we tell the story of Howard Dean’s political campaign and make it interesting in 2025, but how do we even find somebody to tell that story through? Because with audio, you always have to tell it through the eyes of somebody who was there.

How do you decide which stories to focus on for each episode?

We’re just sort of figuring it out along the way. The people that Garrett usually came with are academics or historians or journalists. The people I’m always interested in talking to are just regular people who are going through this stuff. For example, in the Arab Spring episode, I really wanted to get one of the activists who was on the ground using the internet in this way to overthrow this regime. We ultimately did. It took a really long time, but we got one of the main guys, Ahmed Maher.

What do you do when you can’t find that one person you really need to tell the story?

We did this story in episode five about the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm, and I really wanted someone who worked there. We got really close on a couple of people. One of them went on to work for Voice of America in Russia. But I found him right when public media was getting defunded. We almost got him, but he was just rightfully nervous to speak with us about this particular topic. So we ended up not getting anybody for that one. Then it becomes about telling that story without somebody who is on the inside. We just ended up doing it in narration.

Long Shadow: Watch the internet’s outrage machine in action

Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet retraces the story of mankind’s greatest invention, a tool that gave everyone access to all the world’s information and unlocked democracy across the globe. But it’s also about the biggest crisis facing society today: how the web’s unlimited feed of data morphed into a firehose of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and lies that divided Americans over things we once agreed on, like science, diversity, and even democracy itself.

In this video, built from audio produced by Sweikert in the latest season of Long Shadow, the result of online outrage is on full display. Watch this and other videos on Long Lead’s YouTube channel.

What do you think is the most successful moment or episode of the season?

It’s in episode six. We got this woman, Pamela Hemphill — her name just got thrown out in one of the meetings about, “OK, who is going to show us January 6?” And we need to find a person who sort of goes down the rabbit hole of the internet during this time that ends up at [the insurrection]. That was Pamela, also known as the MAGA Granny.

She was a really tough interview, I think, because she’s done a complete 180 on who she was then. Now she’s very liberal and very outspoken about all the things that are happening now under Trump, and remorseful about what she did [on January 6] and the fact that she was there. She just feels like she was brainwashed. So [for] a lot of her interview, at least in the first two hours Garrett and I did, it was really hard to get her back into that mindset of who she was then and what was driving her. And what ultimately leads her to end up in the insurrection.

How did you get her there?

It took a really long time. I did a second interview with her by myself.

I figured out that in the beginning, this was just about community for her. [During the pandemic,] she was lonely, like a lot of people. She wanted to get out of the house and she would go to these protests at the Boise capitol building, anti-lockdown protests and anti-mask protests. I think through her you could really start to understand, in a way that I hadn’t really understood before, why these people were out there doing this. One of the things she said was, “They tell you that you’re saving the country and you believe that.” And why I think she’s the best part of the show, is you get to go down the whole rabbit hole with her, from basically just being somebody who gets their news from Facebook to somebody who ends up pressed against the gates on January 6 at the very front.

She was going live the entire day on Facebook, so all of her tape from that day is available. And so you’re doing this thing where you’re weaving your interview with the real thing that actually happened which is, to me, like the gold standard. If you have the full audio of some major event, and you also have them in the interview describing what they felt in the moment, it’s just this really visceral sequence in the show where she is rushing the Capitol with everybody else. She gets trampled. Then she gets pulled aside, dragged out of there by Capitol police officers who kind of save her. She gets trampled but then she’s still hanging around. She’s going into the Capitol, walking around, even though she got trampled and she got hurt. I think that kind of speaks to the lack of logic that went into a lot of what people did there.

What’s it like for you to listen to somebody talking about doing terrible stuff?

It’s not hard for me. I’ve interviewed a lot of people who have done terrible things. I’ve interviewed mafioso talking about murders they committed. It’s going to sound a little corny, but I just see the humanity in everybody. Judgment from me is not going to get this person to tell the truth about what happened. It’s the opposite. You have to sort of just look at them as a human being who made a mistake. Or who got caught up in a bad moment. In the show, it’s not like we present her in a sympathetic view, but we do try to explain through her reasoning how she got into this. Because I don’t think probably in 2018 this was anybody’s plan.

Further listening from Ryan Sweikert

• “Denise Didn’t Come Home” (Campside Media, Nov. 2024)

• “Chamelon: The Michigan Plot” (Campside Media, Feb. 2024)

• “Crooked City” (truth.media, July 2022)

• “Firebug” (truth.media, Nov. 2023)

• “The Ballad of Billy Balls” (truth.media, March 2019)

Kyoko Oda was born in 1945, in an over-crowded, violent detention camp run by the U.S. government. This 1,100-acre incarceration center known as Tule Lake was home to nearly 30,000 people over the lifetime of its operation and had a specific purpose, Morgan Lieberman reports in The Age of Incarceration: It was designed to punish and separate people of Japanese descent — including American citizens — who in the eyes of the president were deemed particularly disloyal to the United States. Now 80 years old, Oda spent the first years of her life in this camp’s dehumanizing conditions, guarded by a large military presence.

George Takei, born in 1937, also lived at Tule Lake and still vividly remembers the morning two soldiers with rifles marched up the driveway of his family’s home, pounded on their door, and demanded they leave for the camp, immediately. “The soldier [who] pointed his bayonet at our father escorted my mother out,” the 88-year-old Hollywood icon says in an interview. “And when she came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffle bag in the other, and tears were streaming down her cheeks.”

These are just two of the memories that survivors of Japanese American detention camps share in the latest Long Lead feature, The Age of Incarceration, published today. This series of portraits and interviews puts a human face on one of the blackest stains of United States history. It is a history lesson told by those who lived it, a testimony of a time when the U.S. locked up its own people simply because of where their families had come from. With the intent of releasing these testimonials to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, Lieberman began photographing and interviewing the nine survivors over a year ago, never imagining the relevance the project would have today.

To be clear, The Age of Incarceration is not about the xenophobia currently radiating out of the White House. In fact, the name “Trump” only appears twice in the story — but in neither instance is it uttered by a survivor. It’s Lieberman who notes that “President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — who deemed anyone with Japanese ancestry, regardless of citizenship status, a threat to national security — invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power not employed again until March 2025, when President Trump used it to deport Venezuelan immigrants.”

Indeed, the playbook feels familiar. The Japanese American National Museum recently noted the parallels between “Alligator Alcatraz,” a Florida detention camp built by the Trump administration, and Heart Mountain, an incarceration camp in Wyoming opened by Roosevelt’s government. During World War II, 14,000 people — mostly from California’s warmer climate — endured Heart Mountain’s frigid, unforgiving conditions. Jo Anne Naka’s family was among them, though they were sent someplace else, first:

And they were sent at first to Santa Anita Racetrack, where they had to live in the horse stables. And [my mother] said they gave them a sack and told us to stuff it with straw so that they’d have a place to sleep. And there was something wrong with me, something they suspected, my kidneys or something. And so she was almost going to have to leave me. I was still in the hospital, but at the last minute, then they let me go. They released me from the hospital, and so then I went to live in the horse stables with my parents and my sister. And so she had to raise a newborn in the horse stables.

It’s an impossible challenge to tell the full story of one survivor, let alone nine. But through Lieberman’s compassionate reporting and camera work, she’s crafted an emotional narrative that connects them all through their shared experiences, hopes, and fears. There is so much relevant reporting here that we weren’t able to fit it all into The Age of Incarceration. With its launch, Long Lead will begin sharing some of the survivors’ experiences we couldn’t include via our social media accounts, especially our TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky feeds. Please subscribe and share the posts so the their memories can inform modern-day Americans during this current, anxious time.

Part of what makes past tragedies like Japanese American incarceration feel so distant are the ways that the U.S. has seemingly reconciled it in the decades since. Lieberman doesn’t just chronicle the survivors’ strife, she also explores the grace of a people whose own government turned against them, a forgiveness made possible in part by their eventual, successful fight for reparations.

But the truth is that this frightening period wasn’t that long ago, and the intimate details that the survivors share in The Age of Incarceration aren’t far from the circumstances of the present day. The ICE officers raiding workplaces to deport migrants today feels eerily like the U.S. military forcing people from their homes in the 1940s. The chain-linked fence living quarters shown off in the “Alligator Alley” detention center are even worse than the single rooms with a pot-belly stove (backed by a sheet of asbestos) that served as living quarters for entire families at Heart Mountain. And the lack of legal due process for so many imprisoned people is, unfortunately, all too familiar.

We don’t know what will break the current White House’s anti-foreigner fever, but it ultimately took the Supreme Court to free the Japanese American incarcerees during World War II. “Although several Japanese Americans challenged the constitutionality of the incarceration at the Supreme Court, only the case brought by Mitsuye Endo, a clerical employee at the California Department of Employment, succeeded,” Lieberman writes. “The court ruled that the U.S. could not detain ‘concededly loyal citizens.’” The 1944 decision closed the camps and legally ended Japanese American incarceration, but this ruling is not likely to have standing today because the current incarcerees are not American citizens — or, at least, they shouldn’t be.

Until recently the U.S. government had done an admirable job of maintaining records of its past misdeeds. However, during the production of The Age of Incarceration, information began disappearing from websites and databases that the government had maintained. We note at the end of the feature that while the multimedia feature was independently reported, its publication would not have been possible without the archives maintained by Densho, a grassroots nonprofit organization that has been documenting the history of Japanese American incarcerees since 1996.

It would appear — in light of the raids by ICE, America’s construction of modern day incarceration camps, and its abandonment of due process — the Trump administration would like to erase the country’s previous mass incarceration attempts and subsequent reckoning. But it is the responsibility of journalism to hold the powerful to account, and we owe it to the Japanese American incarceration survivors to make sure the world never forgets the injustice they endured.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

“When was the last time you felt good about the internet?” asks Garrett Graff in the opening seconds of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. And it’s a good question. The world feels bleak these days, and nowhere more so than online.

I would know; I’ve basically been here since the web’s beginning. The first time I logged on was in late 1993, after my father and I slipped a modem card into one of the expansion bays of our family’s IBM PS/2 computer. Internet service providers barely existed then, but my sister worked at MIT, so we could use the computer to call the campus’s telephone lines and access, well… not much. There were bulletin boards with bad jokes and images (if you found any) took many minutes to download. Of course, there was no news on the web back then — but on the bright side, that meant there wasn’t any bad news, either.

Released on all major podcast platforms yesterday, the premiere episode of Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet covers these early days of surfing the ‘net. It’s always hard not to be nostalgic about the past, but this episode of Long Shadow makes pains to show how in its quirky infancy, the web had such wonderful potential and generated incredible optimism about the world. Even before the new millenium, we knew the Internet was going to change everything.

The Long Shadow team decided, for its fourth season, to start the story of the internet’s rise and fall at this historical moment, because more than a third of Americans are too young to remember when the Y2K computer bug threatened to destroy the web in its infancy. And many of the two-thirds of Americans who were alive at the time think Y2K was a hoax. “It wasn't a hoax,” Ellen Ullman, a programmer interviewed on the podcast, says near the episode’s close. “We didn't have a collapse because there were armies of dedicated programmers — the job they did was astounding.”

Indeed, to combat the Y2K bug, programmers across the planet worked around the clock on every system in the world, scanning billions of lines of code and manually updating two-digit year formats to four-digit ones. It was an impossible task, but ultimately programmers everywhere connected online to share software updates and patches that staved off the impending catastrophe.

It was such an incredible undertaking that it begs the question: How would the world respond to a similar crisis today? After navigating the coronavirus pandemic, we know the answer is, plainly, “not well.” Something changed in the 20 years between Y2K and COVID-19 that made it impossible to address a global challenge head-on. That something was the internet.

Across seven episodes, Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet retraces 30 years of web history — a tangle of GIFs, blogs, apps, and hashtags — to answer the bewildering question many ask when they go online today: “How did we get here?” Chronicling innovations, revolutions, cyber attacks, and meltdowns, the limited series podcast untangles the web in a way you’ve never considered before.

Hosted by Pulitzer-finalist author and journalist Garrett M. Graff and distributed by PRX, it’s the story of mankind’s greatest invention, how a tool that gave everyone access to all the world’s information unlocked democracy across the globe. Told through gripping first-person narratives by the people who experienced them, Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet is also about the biggest crisis facing society today: How the web's unlimited feed of data morphed into a firehose of hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and lies that caused Americans to divide over things they once agreed on, like science, civic norms, and even democracy itself.

With each new season of Long Shadow, Long Lead aims to raise the bar. Within weeks of its launch in 2021, the first season, 9/11’s Lingering Questions, became a No. 1 history show on Apple Podcasts. Produced in collaboration with Goat Rodeo, the show won a Signal Award for Best History Podcast.

The second season of Long Shadow, titled Rise of the American Far Right, remains shockingly relevant two years after its release and with Trump’s return to the White House. Produced in collaboration with Campside Media, the series was named Best Podcast at the 2024 Edward R. Murrow Awards and also won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Best Narrative Podcast from the Society of Professional Journalists.

In Guns We Trust, the show’s third season produced in collaboration with The Trace and Campside Media, was awarded the RFK Human Rights Journalism Award for its coverage of America’s gun violence epidemic. The season was also nominated for a Peabody Award and an IDA Award, in addition to winning three Signal Awards, among other honors. A month after its final episode was released, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence “a public health crisis.” This past spring, the show became part of Harvard Law School’s curriculum on the Second Amendment.

Long Lead Presents: Depth Perception

The web's "original sin": Garrett Graff on tech's deadly embrace of the algorithm

A quarter century ago, as the world held its breath waiting to see if Y2K would bring a digital apocalypse or just another New Year's hangover, President Bill Clinton celebrated how technology had created a moment of shared global experience…

Read more

9 months ago · 2 likes · Long Lead and Parker Molloy

Long Shadow is distributed by PRX, one of the world’s top podcast publishers and public radio distributors. Through this partnership, the podcast has been broadcast on dozens of public radio stations nationwide, reaching countless listeners. As PRX notes on its LinkedIn page: “Millions of Americans rely on the trusted journalism, educational content, and enriching storytelling that defines public media. PRX programming airs on hundreds of local stations nationwide, reaching listeners in more than 99% of the U.S.” Long Lead is proud to be a part of this network.

Public media’s struggle to retain legally appropriated taxpayer funds that have been awarded in a bipartisan manner over the past 50 years is not covered in Long Shadow: Breaking the Internet. But the anti-public broadcasting fever that’s overtaken small corners of the web is certainly part of the broader narrative.

As Long Shadow shows across its fourth season, there is something wrong on the internet. What was once an engine with the power to fuel democracy has now become a weapon aimed at the very heart of it. The modern internet — and the technocrats running it — aims to splinter the people who once united on it. But as the programmers of Y2K showed, we can overcome anything so long as we work together.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

The best photojournalism isn’t something you just look at. The most powerful images immediately become a part of you.

One photo, in particular, haunts me. The image shows a U.S. National Guardsman in a gas mask, pointing his grenade launcher inside a car full of civilians amid a sea of protesters. Panic and terror leapt out of that scene and into photojournalist Raymond Depardon’s camera that day at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The image is one of more than 200 that Long Lead selected to be included in The People vs. Rubber Bullets, an award-winning visual explainer outlining the endemic misuse of these weapons. Not surprisingly, the snapshot is a Magnum photo.

You don’t forget Magnum photos once you see them; Magnum photographers’ documentary-style, story-driven images instantly imprint themselves on viewers. Visually stunning, their images use light, composition, and framing masterfully to capture timeless moments of social and political impact that endure eras and find new relevancy as the world continues to turn. That’s why, after publishing The People vs. Rubber Bullets, Long Lead started talking with Magnum Photos, the world’s leading photography collective, to team up on a new approach to visual journalism. Today we’re excited to launch our first collaborative photo feature, The Last Drops of Mexico City.

In this visual essay, Magnum photographer Jérôme Sessini documents the Mexican capital’s diminished drinking water supply, fixing his lens on the people impacted most by this arid new reality. Bolstered by reporting from Rodrigo Cervantes, a former Mexico City bureau chief for NPR member station KJZZ, Sessini captures lakes dried up, reservoirs drained low, and taps running dry, as the people who relied on them suffer from ingesting water that’s not fit for consumption. It’s a sharp examination of a complex, longstanding problem rooted in a number of exacerbating factors, from climate change and over-development to pollution and chaotic population growth. But also, it’s not just about Mexico City; Sessini and Cervantes’ reporting zooms in on local challenges while acknowledging the global stakes of what a drinking water crisis of this kind could mean for other mega cities across the globe.

The photo feature is a result of years — if not decades — of work by Sessini and Cervantes. “As someone born and raised in Mexico City, I grew up aware of the problems that the city has faced for decades, sometimes centuries,” says Cervantes, in an interview with Parker Molloy in tomorrow’s issue of Depth Perception. “Water shortages is one of them, but the experience as bureau chief allowed me to get a closer look at the issue, particularly as the citizens’ concerns started to grow with global warming and overpopulation.”

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Sessini, a prolific conflict photographer, brought a different perspective to examining the city’s plight. “Everyone speaks about climate issues, but sometimes it’s something very abstract,” he tells Molloy. “I used this topic to make it concrete, so people can understand and identify themselves with the problem.”

Magnum Photos, seeking more immersive ways to tell visual stories, brought the idea of this water crisis feature to Long Lead. “Partnerships and trusted collaborations between independent organizations is what will empower journalism in these challenging times,” says Giulietta Palumbo, Magnum’s editorial director. “Working together, Magnum Photos and Long Lead will produce pieces that help readers keep their eyes on the most pertinent issues of the day and navigate the social, economic, and political landscape with sharp and critical judgement.”

Long Lead and Magnum Photos, starting with The Last Drops of Mexico City, aim to reinvent impact-driven photo essays for the digital era. It’s an ambitious effort, but with bold photojournalists and advancements in computing, coding, and display technologies — not to mention camera and image capturing tech — there’s so much potential for visual reporting to make a dent (or fix existing ones) in the world. Sessini and Cervantes’ work is just the first taste of what’s to come this year from Long Lead.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

Today marks three years since Russia invaded Ukraine. While talks are ongoing between the U.S. and Russia about the war, Ukrainians continue to live in a state of uncertainty.

After visiting the Ukrainian war zone in spring 2022, photojournalist Maranie Staab knew she wanted to return and report on Ukrainians working selflessly to help the less fortunate survive the conflict. She ultimately pitched what would become Long Lead’s first photo essay, Lifting Ukraine, a striking profile of Anna Kurkurina, a world-record-setting powerlifter who has fought the Russian invasion in her own way, by rescuing and rehoming animals orphaned by the war.

“Anna's story is about the exceptional work of one woman in wartime, but it's also about everyday people and how they survive individually and as a community,” says Staab. The photo essay won a Webby Award and a Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Use of Photography, and its technical development was featured in the Webby Awards and WP Engine’s Crafted With Code Showcase.

Though Kurkurina’s story is propelled by conflict, what compelled Staab to report it was how human her struggle is. “Anna is very relatable,” she says. “She's very much like you and me, and anyone who might read her story. She just happens to be in Ukraine and her country is under siege, but just like all of us, she's trying to live a meaningful life, in peace.”

Staab is no stranger to putting herself in danger for her work, but this kind of coverage requires research and preparedness. She readies for war zone reporting by taking formal hostile environment and emergency first aid (HEFAT) training, for example. Outside of logistical preparations, covering a war-torn country can take emotional resilience. But Staab says it’s “contagious being around people who can’t leave their homes but are getting up every single day and asking how they can make the situation better for others.”

While Staab speaks about Kurkurina’s “stubborn joy,” even on her busiest days helping Ukraine’s less fortunate, the weightlifter experienced “in-between moments where you can really see the exhaustion.” It happened, for instance, in times of doubt when funding to pay for the food or medical care for the animals was uncertain.

Staab lived with Kurkurina for just under a month in August 2023, as she documented the world-champion’s life, capturing many facets of her humanitarianism: rescuing animals found on the streets, delivering food and supplies to animals and civilians, teaching fitness classes at her gym, coaching kids with cerebral palsy, and more.

Neither the photographer or her subject shared a common language, so they used nonverbal communication and Google Translator to build a rapport, which has now become a lasting friendship. “Translator became a big part of the way we communicated,” Staab says.

Many parts of Kurkurina’s life were visually compelling and lent themselves to the multimedia treatment developed by Long Lead Creative Director Sarah Rogers and Decimal Studios, which built the Lifting Ukraine website. “It's always exciting to be part of the first of something,” says Staab of reporting Long Lead’s first photo essay.“It was invigorating, and it made me that much more motivated to capture as much as I could,” she adds.

“As a freelancer, too often those stories are never fully realized, but Long Lead was able to take all of these components and put together this incredible multimedia presentation of Anna's story in a final format that I'm still incredibly proud to have been a part of.”

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Last week, the American Society of Magazine Editors named Long Lead a two-time National Magazine Award finalist for Home of the Brave, our multimedia feature on LA's endemic unhoused veterans crisis. We are honored by the nominations.

Seventy news outlets received National Magazine Award nominations this year. Just 14 received two nods. Long Lead is proud to be included among them. For more information on the awards, including details about the other great pieces of journalism honored, click here.

Reported across several years, Home of the Brave chronicles a centuries-spanning land war between the U.S. government, local forces, and generations of vets seeking support, justice, and a place to call home. Last fall a judge ruled in favor of the vets, ordering the VA to build thousands more housing units. The government has defied the order, and after the wildfires, the homeless veteran crisis is now a catastrophe — an avoidable one with a massive property sitting underutilized for its intended purpose. Long Lead will continue reporting on this crisis until the courts decide these veterans’ fate. Subscribe to the Home of the Brave newsletter to follow the latest news on their case.

Since its release last summer, Home of the Brave has received critical praise from a broad swath of organizations. The multimedia feature’s documentary film short, “The Promised Land” won runner-up honors at The Veterans Film Festival in November 2024, when it was also named an official selection of the inaugural Round Top Film Festival. The Anthem Awards also recognized the feature with three prizes for raising awareness in humanitarian action and services, as well as human and civil rights.

Later this week, the National Press Foundation will present Long Lead with the Wounded Warrior Project Award for Excellence in Coverage of Veterans at the organization’s annual awards dinner in Washington, DC.

“They were in a class by themselves,” NPF judges said. “They elevated their storytelling in a way that is so compelling.”

In September, Long Lead published Jacob Kushner’s “An Unnatural Disaster,” a feature charting the birth, life, and gradual destruction of Canaan — a city that rose from the rubble of Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake. Through intimate portraits of residents, Kushner chronicles how 250,000 people built a functioning city without government support, only to see it fall prey to the gang violence that has consumed much of Haiti following President Jovenel Moïse’s 2021 assassination. Reported across nearly a decade and bolstered by Allison Shelley’s photography, the Pulitzer Center-supported piece stands as both a testament to Haitians’ remarkable resilience and a sobering examination of how the collapse of state institutions can unravel even the most determined community-building efforts.

Behind this sweeping narrative stands the meticulous work of fact-checker Jameson Francisque. A 32-year-old former journalist living in Canada who left Haiti in 2023 amid escalating violence, Francisque brought both journalistic rigor and deep cultural understanding to the task of verifying the story's complex details. His work, while invisible to readers, was essential to maintaining the piece's authority and accuracy — particularly challenging given Canaan's limited official documentation and the complex political dynamics at play. In an era of increasing misinformation, fact-checkers like Francisque serve as journalism's vital but often unseen safeguards.

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Periodic updates on Long Lead's in-depth journalism.

The challenges of fact-checking a story of this scope were considerable, especially from abroad. “It was complicated at first just to reach people,” Francisque tells Long Lead via WhatsApp. “Some sources were easier to contact than others, and with internet problems in Haiti, some days I couldn’t connect with anyone at all.” 

The story’s decade-long timeline brought its own hurdles. “Sometimes people don’t remember exactly what they said six or seven years ago,” Francisque explains. “And unlike other countries, you don’t have actual laws or regulations in Haiti that guarantee access to information. Everything is a big secret, and you have to know someone who knows someone who knows someone to get anything.” 

Haiti’s deteriorating security further complicated matters: “When Jacob was reporting, you could actually go to Canaan without security concerns, Francisque notes. “But now things have changed. I had one source who was initially afraid to talk because she’s still there.”

Fact-checking such a complex story demanded a methodical approach. “I printed out the whole story and first verified everything I could without talking to anyone — dates, events, anything I could find online,” Francisque said. His process included watching graphic footage of a lynching to confirm details of the incident. “That was very painful; I had to view images that are hard to process.” Only after researching every verifiable element did he begin the time-consuming task of interviewing sources. “I spoke with people for two or three hours each, because they had to explain a lot. But since I’d already checked the events and other parts of the story, it was easier to confirm what I already knew.”

Fact-checking a story about Haiti required more of Francisque than simply tracking down sources and verifying events. Even basic online research was fraught. With internet access expanding rapidly in the country, the line between legitimate news and misinformation has blurred — a trend that’s being felt around the world. “People in Haiti are discovering the internet, so they end up consuming everything — both good information and bad.” Francisque relied heavily on a small number of reputable outlets in fact-checking “An Unnatural Disaster.” “If I couldn’t find information from one of these reliable sources, I noted in the fact-checking process that certain sources might not be as trustworthy,” he says. “But sometimes, that’s all we have.”

Kushner emphasized the value of Francisque's work. “For a writer, there’s nothing more comforting than working with a stellar fact-checker, because you can rest assured that by the time the piece runs, everything is correct,” he says. Having a Creole-speaking fact-checker was crucial to reviewing everything from WhatsApp messages to voice notes with sources, Kushner adds. “Jameson was incredibly diligent. I love it when fact-checkers don’t just flag a problem but also offer a solution or do their own research to find supporting evidence, which he did repeatedly.” Along with editor Pooja Bhatia, Francisque helped transform Kushner’s years of reporting into a polished final piece. “I’m incredibly grateful to Long Lead for hiring both an incredible editor, Pooja Bhatia, and a stellar fact-checker, Jameson, specifically to turn this piece into what it became,” Kushner says.

In an age of social media and understaffed newsrooms, dedicated fact-checking has become something of a lost art. Some publications have scaled back their fact-checking departments, while others rely on writers to vet their own work. The rise of “citizen journalism” and the pressure to publish quickly have further eroded this vital layer of editorial oversight. Publications that still invest in rigorous fact-checking — especially for long-form narrative journalism — are increasingly rare. Yet as “An Unnatural Disaster” demonstrates, this painstaking process remains essential to producing journalism with lasting impact and authority.

The devaluation of fact-checking was highlighted again this month when Meta announced plans to end its fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The company’s decision to remove fact-checker oversight of potentially false claims is a blow to information integrity online. Stories like “An Unnatural Disaster” show why this trend is alarming. Without meticulous verification, complex narratives involving multiple timelines, contested events, and scant documentation become nearly impossible to tell with confidence. The work of fact-checkers like Francisque doesn’t just catch errors, it fosters trust among readers and sources alike.

Canaan’s story underscores the resilience of a community rising from disaster as well as the vital role of rigorous fact-checking in journalism. Without the painstaking work of fact-checkers like Jameson Francisque — who navigated both digital misinformation and real-world security concerns — an account of this complexity would collapse under the weight of unchecked rumor and incomplete records. As newsrooms face pressure to cut costs and publish quickly, “An Unnatural Disaster” reminds us that investing in factual accuracy isn’t optional; it’s the bedrock of journalism that aspires to inform and illuminate rather than merely persuade. By committing to the thorough, and often arduous, verification process, publications can preserve readers’ trust and ensure that the stories they tell truly stand the test of time.

This past year has been a transformative and award-winning one for Long Lead. Our features ranged from podcasts to photo essays, and demonstrated the impact of journalism without compromise. From our in-depth, multimedia report on veterans fighting the VA for housing to our narrative podcast chronicling how decades of gun violence has impacted America, our reporting was pivotal in affecting change. We’re proud to share this year’s highlights with you.

Long Lead’s first feature of 2024 was LIFTING UKRAINE, Maranie Staab’s moving photo essay about Anna Kurkurina, a record-settling powerlifter who has rescued and rehomed countless injured and unhoused pets orphaned by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This riveting account of survival in wartime is not just about Kurkurina’s volunteer efforts. Chronicling how she became a world champion athlete at 40 years old, LIFTING UKRAINE showcases her determination and selflessness as she teaches Ukrainian women to be strong and helps disabled children learn to walk — all while running her animal rescue network.

In the spring, we released the third season of our podcast LONG SHADOW. Produced in collaboration with The Trace, Campside Media, and PRX, LONG SHADOW: IN GUNS WE TRUST chronicles how firearms moved from being an ordinary part of the background of rural life to a menacing element of modern American life. Weeks after the last episode came out, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory declaring gun violence "a public health crisis."

At the Signal Awards, the season won Best History Podcast, Documentary Podcast, and Activism, Public Service, & Social Impact Podcast. It was also nominated for Best Audio Documentary at the International Documentary Association Awards and was named one of the year’s top podcasts by Audible, Mashable, and The Week. We also launched a LONG SHADOW website, complete with all of the episodes, transcripts, and any news surrounding the show.

Long Lead was also honored with an Edward R. Murrow Award for the podcast’s second season, LONG SHADOW: RISE OF THE AMERICAN FAR RIGHT, in New York City in October. The Society of Professional Journalists also named the season the Best Narrative Podcast at its Sigma Delta Chi Awards in July.

HOME OF THE BRAVE, Long Lead’s seven-part, multimedia series about the chronic mismanagement of the West Los Angeles VA campus, published in June, just a few months before a group of disabled vets took their fight for housing to court.

While the story continues to develop (stay current through by subscribing to our HOME OF THE BRAVE newsletter), the series has won an array of honors, including selections in film festivals nationwide and Anthem Awards for Best Humanitarian Action & Services Awareness and Best Human & Civil Rights Awareness. And today, it was given a Wounded Warrior Project Award for excellence in coverage of veterans by the National Press Foundation.

The first line of Judge David Carter’s decision in the lawsuit echoed the first line of Long Lead’s feature, a sign showing the incredible impact of our reporting. The veterans won their lawsuit, but the government has since appealed the ruling. Long Lead will continue to report on this story in 2025.

In September, Long Lead published an epic report nearly a decade in the making. AN UNNATURAL DISASTER, by Jacob Kushner with photographs by Allison Shelley, tracks how the Haitian city of Canaan rose from the rubble of the Caribbean country’s 2010 7.0-magnitude earthquake. But despite the Haitian community banding together to create a city forgotten by their nation’s leaders, its residents’ lives now hang in the balance as merciless gangs have overtaken the country.

Published at the close of last year, THE CATCH — Emily Sohn’s gripping profile of forgotten Sports Illustrated writer Virginia Kraft — reeled in awards and critical praise all year, earning inclusion in Triumph Books’ The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024 and besting features from several major news outlets at both the Webby Awards and Newhouse Mirror Awards.

In a world where we need journalism more than ever, Long Lead’s DEPTH PERCEPTION newsletter championed standout work from fearless reporters in the media. The free, weekly newsletter’s most popular issues this year included interviews with Jacob Soboroff on Trump immigration documentary Separated, Sari Botton on acting her age (or not), Ben Collins on becoming the CEO of The Onion, and Mehdi Hasan on how his "big mouth" launched his career. Mark Yarm and Parker Molloy are lining up more hard-hitting interviews for next year. Read them by subscribing to DEPTH PERCEPTION.

As Long Lead looks forward to 2025 and our new features push the boundaries of journalism even further, we want to thank you, our audience, for supporting our work. Next year, great journalism, crafted with care and consideration, will be as important as ever, and we look forward to sharing more with you soon. In the meantime, wind down your year by catching up with these standout features — and maybe even share them with a friend.

Best,

Jensen Rubinstein

Audience Development Manager, Long Lead

Just after Labor Day, while taking an afternoon stroll through the streets of Austin, I was walking on air. Hours before, a federal judge in Los Angeles had handed down an opinion on an issue we had been covering at Long Lead for years, and it promised real change. It was a moment journalists dream of, when years of reporting indelibly impact the lives of victims of a clear injustice.

In the landmark ruling, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter declared that the Department of Veterans Affairs had violated its fiduciary responsibilities to LA's unhoused veterans across a span of decades when it had leased out parts of the massive West LA VA campus to outside groups for uses unrelated to the care of disabled service members. Specifically, the judge ordered the termination of VA leases with UCLA and the Brentwood School and the construction of thousands of housing units for homeless veterans on the property.

Get the whole story: An epic government scandal hiding in plain sight

Home of the Brave is a multi-part, multimedia series exploring the unhoused veteran crisis at the West LA VA campus, a 388-acre property that was deeded to the U.S. government to provide veterans housing. Over the last 50 years, that land has been carved up and leased to private interests, while development for veteran housing has been painfully slow.

This feature tells the rest of the story of a land grab dating back to the U.S. Civil War, a tale marked with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death. Read it today.

I looked down at the weather app on my phone. Figuratively and literally, it was 72 degrees and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. When I looked back up from the screen, a rail-thin man was walking towards me. “Can you help a homeless vet?” he asked. The truth is, I couldn’t.

“Sorry, I don’t have any cash,” I told him, but the full reason flashed through my head in an instant: I was a visitor in an unfamiliar town, so I didn’t know where to send him for homeless resources. I also didn’t have any food — I usually carry granola bars in my bag for exactly this reason, but I didn’t have any on me. If I were in my car, I could’ve given him some of the bottled water in the trunk, but I was walking. 

Most importantly, though, I knew that despite our best efforts at holding the VA accountable for its underwhelming support of unhoused veterans, the department was unlikely to change on its own. And that’s not a dig at the people who work there. Despite being the second-largest department in the federal government with more than 400,000 employees, the VA — at least as it organizes its homeless services — is under budgeted and understaffed.

Every day court has been in session, Long Lead has been reporting from Powers v. McDonough, the disabled veterans’ class action lawsuit against the federal government seeking permanent housing on the West LA VA campus. To get updates sent direct to your inbox as soon as they publish, subscribe here:

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For the past three years, our team has reported on the history of the West LA VA, a vast, incredible property situated on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. This land had been donated to the federal government in 1888 specifically to house disabled veterans. Within decades, the idyllic green space became a home for the nation’s battle worn, an ‘Old People’s Paradise’ filled with retiree barracks, amusements, and palm trees. At its peak in the 1950s, around 5,000 veterans lived there. Then, after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake, the VA evicted the veterans from the property and began leasing it out to private groups. Now LA has around 4,000 unhoused vets, the most of any city in America.

Our report tells the full story — from the property’s founding to the legal fight to take it back — of a centuries-spanning land war between the U.S. government, local forces, and generations of wounded veterans seeking support, justice, and a place to call home. In reporting it, we met veterans paralyzed by a quagmire of bureaucracy that kept them on the streets, while well-funded schools put ballfields, pools, and parking lots on the land that once housed them. It left the VA — claiming it did not have the congressional authority to build housing — flatfooted for the pandemic, when the sidewalk outside the West LA VA became lined with tents, each bearing the American flag and occupied by unhoused veterans seeking shelter near the facility where they got vital medical services.

The VA’s unhoused veterans crisis is a scandal in plain sight, complete with government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death. What’s worse, it is a problem that Abraham Lincoln solved the month before his assassination, when he established National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, which ultimately became a network of more than a dozen facilities nationwide that housed and served vets. The VA’s rise over the past century brought about the fall of the Soldiers Homes, and no president since Eisenhower has stepped in to fill this gap, which is more jarring than ever. 

This election year, presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle claimed they had done great by the vets. That's debatable, especially considering this lawsuit consisted of veterans living in the streets around Kamala Harris's Brentwood home and suing the Biden administration after the Trump administration refused to shelter them during the pandemic. 

But the nation's unhoused veterans crisis goes beyond housing. Our sources — including VA experts — say that services, not just shelter, are essential to solving the problem. “A veteran community must include not only housing units, but the ‘connective tissue’ essential to healing, thriving, and then reintegration,” notes Judge Carter in his ruling.

Long Lead is proud to announce that “The Promised Land” is an official selection for The Veterans Film Festival. The 25-minute film provides an unflinching look at LA’s homeless veteran crisis, letting unhoused heroes give a street-level view of what life is like when your government leaves you behind.

The documentary short is part of Home of the Brave and was directed by Bronze Star Army veteran and documentary filmmaker Rebecca Murga.

The Veterans Film Festival is Nov. 14–15 at Bob Hope Patriotic Hall in LA. For more information, click here.

So on Veterans Day, as the VA is appealing Carter's ruling ordering the government to house vets on land gifted to the federal government for that specific purpose, it makes sense to ask Congress, President Biden, and President Trump a question only they are able to answer: “Can you help a homeless vet?”

The federal government's decades-long, claim that the VA cannot build and maintain housing has resulted in miles of red tape, an absence of accountability, and the deaths of countless service members on the streets of America. And as the VA's legal resistance to this reality slowly grinds through the courts, we'll lose more. A decade of litigation has yet to solve this life and death issue — but legislation and leadership can.

It's past the time to build a future for these forgotten heroes. It's time, as Judge Carter said in his ruling, to bring them home.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

As soon as I read the pitch, I knew it was a Long Lead feature. “After an earthquake destroyed Haiti’s capital, a new city was born on an empty plot of land at the edge of a graveyard,” Jacob Kushner’s email read. Within months, hundreds of thousands of survivors had flocked there and set upon building a new home. But as the city had sprouted from rubble, its country’s government began to collapse. What would become of the people of Canaan? We explore that and more in “An Unnatural Disaster,” the latest from Long Lead.

It was a fascinating concept born out of 13 years of reporting: The rise and fall of one of the world’s newest cities — and what it means in an increasingly nationless world. In the moment I read that email and in the months after, the piece promised global relevance. In recent years, fragile states from Afghanistan to Somalia have collapsed or teetered on the verge of it. Even stable nations like Germany and Canada had people storming their parliament buildings. And, of course, there was rioting in the capital of the free world, Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. How would Americans react if their government had failed like Haiti’s?

But first, what is a Long Lead feature? Our fledgling outlet recently passed its third anniversary, and our body of work tells the power of journalism’s impact. Our first-ever production, “Long Shadow: 9/11’s Lingering Questions” rocketed to the top of Apple Podcasts’ history charts within days, and served as an annual reminder for people who swore they’d “never forget.” Our next, the multimedia profile “The Depths She’ll Reach” explored the darkness of personal trauma and depression with a world champion freediver. The feature was read worldwide, took top honors from the Webby Awards, Longreads, Longform, and others, and provided both perspective and a respite from the pandemic.

Over the past few years, Long Lead’s journalism has shone a light on issues as varied as disinformation to gun violence, reaching millions of people with the highest-quality editorial possible. We call it “journalism without compromise,” and the result has not only been piles of awards, but impact. Our features have given a voice to victims of warfare, police violence, and gender discrimination. 

For instance, weeks after the release of “Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust,” our podcast made in collaboration with The Trace, the U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence a public health crisis. And after we published “Home of the Brave” — a multimedia feature on Los Angeles’ homeless veterans crisis — a federal judge ruled that the VA had been discriminating against vets for decades and ordered it to build vets housing. The first sentence of his ruling echoed the first line of our feature. 

Long Lead features make a dent in the world, and that’s exactly what journalism needs to do in this moment. Over the past year, as we produced this feature on Haiti, we never altered its focus: Haitians, desperate to save their country, built a city from the rubble of an apocalyptic earthquake only to risk their lives against an even bigger danger: the long, slow, violent collapse of their national government.

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“An Unnatural Disaster,” written by Kushner, is a heartbreaking feature that’s destined to change the conversation America has been having about Haitians during this toxic presidential election news cycle. Brought to life by dozens of photos by Allison Shelley, it shows Haiti’s beauty and chaos, the hope of its people, and the dire straits of their plight. For years, the two reported on Haiti concurrently under grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, cultivating deep, enduring relationships with the sources who appear in the feature. Long Lead is honored to bring their experience to you now, when it’s needed most.

And we have more impactful journalism and big initiatives in the pipeline. The best way to support our work is by sharing it with your networks — whether that means posting our features to your social media or forwarding our newsletters to your friends. (You should definitely subscribe to our other newsletter, Depth Perception, if you haven’t already.) We’ll be especially grateful for you to get the word out about ”An Unnatural Disaster,” a feature more than a decade in the making that was made for exactly this moment.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

Looking for a great summer read or listen? Check out these award-winning features produced by Long Lead.

“The Catch,” by Emily Sohn

In the Mad Men era of magazine journalism, Virginia Kraft was deadly with a rifle and penned epic, deeply reported features for Sports Illustrated. Among the most important sports journalists of her time, the pioneering adventure writer chiseled early cracks into publishing’s male-dominated world. In this profile and personal essay, journalist Emily Sohn explores why no one has heard of her.

At the 2024 Mirror Awards, Sohn was honored with the Best Profile prize. Judges from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University were effusive in their praise for Emily's work:

"We love every aspect of this story — the subject, the reporting, the writing, the structure, the formatting, the photos, and the pull quotes — were tremendous, all around."

Here are all the awards “The Catch” hauled in so far this year:

Webby Awards

• Best Individual Editorial Feature

Newhouse Mirror Awards

• Best Profile

Society of News Design

• Award of Excellence, Design: Features

• Award of Excellence, Design: Social Issues

“Long Shadow,” by Garrett Graff

Through a series of riveting, complex narratives, this podcast series makes sense of what people know — and what they thought they knew — about the most pivotal moments in U.S. history, including Waco, Columbine, 9/11, January 6, and beyond.

The Society of Professional Journalists recently named the second season of Long Shadow, Rise of the American Far Right, the Best Narrative Podcast at its 2023 Sigma Delta Chi Awards earlier this month. The annual honors, which have been around for 85 years, acknowledge the best in journalism to promote “the free flow of information vital to a well-informed citizenry.”

Long Shadow “does what podcasts are uniquely situated to do,” said the SPJ in its awards announcement. “[It] allows the creators to take a long look at events and pick out pathways and threads that may otherwise be lost in the moment, but with the perspective of time glow brightly when studied.” Meanwhile, season three, In Guns We Trust, got a pair of early “Best of 2024” honors.

Here’s everything the podcast has won this summer:

Society of Professional Journalists - Sigma Delta Chi Award

• Best Narrative Podcast or Radio Documentary

Mashable

• Best Podcast of 2024

The Week

• Best Podcast of 2024

“Lifting Ukraine,” by Maranie Staab

Since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, world-record-setting powerlifter Anna Kurkurina has saved and sheltered countless injured and orphaned animals, ensuring that in her country’s fight for independence, more than just the strong will survive.

In this series of intimate photos and videos, photojournalist Maranie Staab presents an inspiring profile of Kurkurina, chronicling the athlete’s daily struggles and triumphs as she attempts to uplift the most vulnerable inhabitants of her city, Mykolaiv. Rescuing pets left to scavenge the rubble of airstrikes, strength-training disabled children, and feeding an ever-growing pack of four-legged houseguests, the three-time world champion muscles through her days demonstrating unwavering strength in the face of seemingly endless war.

Long Lead’s first foray into photo essays, this timely, heartfelt feature was a hit at this year’s Webby Awards:

Webby People’s Voice Award

• Best Use of Photography

Webby Awards

• Best Use of Photography

We are honored by the praise given to Long Lead productions this summer — and the season isn’t even halfway done. More great longform features are on on the way. Until then, be sure to subscribe to “Depth Perception,” our weekly newsletter celebrating the best journalism everywhere, and the practitioners who shape it.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of Americans were sheltering in their homes and banging on pots and pans to celebrate the heroics of medical professionals, a curious sight popped up along a sidewalk in Los Angeles: dozens of uniformed tents, all pitched in a neat row, each adorned with large, crisp, level American flags.

On one side of the tents was San Vicente Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare full of speeding cars and idling engines. On the other was a wrought iron fence, a barrier that kept the veterans off the vast, green lawn of the West Los Angeles Veterans Affairs campus. From their perch on the sidewalk, America’s war heroes had a perfect view of the property, which dared them to dream about living on the other side.

This massive chunk of valuable Los Angeles land was donated to the federal government in 1888, specifically for housing disabled soldiers. Ten years later, 1,000 veterans lived there. Over the next 30 years, 91 buildings were constructed, providing care and lodging to 2,300 service members. By the early 1950s, 5,000 veterans called the campus home.

Today, more than 3,800 unhoused veterans live on the streets of LA — the homeless veteran capital of America. Why? The answer is a scandal in plain sight, a story of government malfeasance, neglect, graft, and even death.

Out today, Long Lead’s latest feature, “Home of the Brave,” is the story of how 388 acres of the world’s most valuable real estate were slowly taken from military veterans — and how they’re now fighting to take it back. This seven-part, multimedia feature includes a veteran-produced documentary film, transports audiences to this once proud “old people’s paradise,” and chronicles a centuries-spanning land war between the U.S. government, local forces, and generations of vets seeking a place to call home.

This summer, a group of disabled veterans seeking permanent housing on the West LA VA campus are taking the federal government to court. Through the class action lawsuit, Powers v. McDonough, they hope to compel the VA to build more housing, faster, on this land. At issue in the trial isn’t just the fate of these unhoused service members, but perhaps an entirely new way of approaching veteran care. If VA’s mission is to care for those ‘who shall have borne the battle,’ where does that care begin and end? Powers v. McDonough has the potential to extend the VA’s purview beyond its hospital walls and back into the realm of housing, as it originally was on this property.

Telling the full story of the West LA VA, from the property’s founding to the legal fight to take it back, the team behind “Home of the Brave” explores the crisis of veteran homelessness from all angles. Los Angeles-based journalists Samuel Braslow and Andrew Nusca provide street-level views of what it’s like to be under-served service members in America today. Jasper Craven, an investigative reporter who specializes in covering the VA, explores the decades of graft and inappropriate land use that has kept veterans from being housed on the land. And Army veteran and documentary filmmaker Rebecca Murga — supported by drone footage from photojournalist and Marine veteran Russell Midori — gives the unhoused veterans a voice in the feature, capturing their lives and struggles in a short film.

Lastly, Meghann Cuniff, whom the Washington Post calls “arguably the most influential legal journalist working today,” will provide daily news briefs and reporting from the landmark trial. From pretrial procedures through the lawsuit’s conclusion, the Home of the Brave newsletter is the best place to follow the veterans’ fight for housing at the West LA VA.

Home of the Brave — a Long Lead Newsletter

Daily court briefings and updates from Powers v. McDonough, the disabled veterans’ class action lawsuit against the federal government seeking permanent housing on the West LA VA campus

We will share more about “Home of the Brave” in the weeks and months ahead. Until then, thank you for supporting our work. You can enjoy more about Long Lead’s award-winning, longform journalism at LongLead.com.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

When Long Lead began developing the most recent season of Long Shadow, we had a theory. The demand for a season-long look at the American gun violence epidemic would be… small. I mean, in a world of audio where you can listen to everything from Julia Louis-Dreyfus extracting the genius from Carol Burnett to Joe Rogan saying whatever it is that Joe Rogan says, why would folks choose to learn about guns and mass shootings?

But we made Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust anyway, and here’s why: Because no one else would. Podcasting, as a business, is not particularly lucrative. Great shows are expensive to produce, and while tons of people make podcasts, advertisers aren’t necessarily flocking to support them. And a show about the explosion of guns across the U.S. and the trail of carnage that it’s produced? Well, no one wants to sell a mattress, email newsletter service, or vitamin supplement opposite that content.

Still, Long Shadow host Garrett Graff paired up with nonprofit gun violence newsroom The Trace to assemble a wild, compelling, and fascinating tour of how guns became so prevalent in 2024 America. And against the odds, listeners have gotten hooked on it. “One of the most important podcasts,” writes a recent reviewer on Apple Podcasts. “Season 3 of Long Shadow achieves the same magic as the prior two,” writes another. “It should be required listening in history classes,” writes a third.

It’s a funny thing about that last one: Earlier this week a history professor at a major university wrote to us and said she was requiring it for her class next semester. She also asked if we had transcripts available because one of her students is deaf. I pointed her to Long Shadow’s new website, where you can listen to the episodes, keep up with the show, and find full transcripts.

The votes are in — and Long Lead wins!

Two Long Lead features won Webby Awards earlier this month — and Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right earned a nomination — which is quite the feat. Our mission is to produce the highest quality journalism, without compromise. Help us raise the bar in news — read and share our award-worthy productions, today:

The Catch: Best Individual Editorial Feature
Lifting Ukraine: Best Use of Photography
Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right, Best Limited Series Podcast, News & Politics (nomination)

Personally, I learned so much about America’s gun violence epidemic while producing this season — and the lessons weren’t always about firearms. Here are six surprising things I learned while listening:

1. An NRA bigwig put out a hit on a bird.
   The state bird of Florida, the Northern Mockingbird, has been the same since 1927. In the 1990s, the Florida Audubon Society started drumming up support for a new candidate: the Florida scrub jay, which was teetering close to extinction. “Then out of nowhere, Marion showed up,” Mike Spies of The Trace says in episode two, “Shall Not Be Infringed.”NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer had had no interest in a break with tradition. “Scrub jays are lazy and scurrilous,” she says on tape on the podcast. “They eat the eggs and nestlings of other birds. To me, that's robbery and murder, and it's not good family values.” The Northern Mockingbird remains Florida’s state bird today because Hammer wanted it that way. Why? Listen and find out. (The short answer is “guns.”)
   

2. The “good guy with a gun” is pure marketing.
   We’ve all heard the phrase “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” But that wasn’t just a catchy phrase or a bit of (flawed) logic, says Jennifer Mascia of The Trace in episode five, “A Good Guy With a Gun.” The NRA president Wayne LaPierre was talking about it in 2005, and the organization started focus grouping it in public interviews in 2007, she says. Then in 2012, it reached its apex. “No matter what, they will always hew to this argument because it is the most successful argument for selling guns in America.”
   

3. On the gun rights side, “compromiser” is a dirty word.
   Former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman did a lot to propel the issues important to gun rights folks, and he stands by his work — including collaborating with the Clinton administration to ensure child safety locks were sold with all guns. Used correctly, the devices would stop an unauthorized user from being able to fire the gun. At the time, Feldman was working with gun manufacturers, and the White House enlisted his help getting the initiative in place. In episode three, “The Right to Bear AR-15s,” he recounts telling the manufacturers, “We have an opportunity to be on the right side of this one. It's nothing we oppose. We're all for firearm safety.” He was fired two years later, in part, he says, because of the trigger lock deal — but he doesn't regret any of it. Feldman had been deemed a traitor for compromising. “The worst thing you can say to a gun rights person is ‘He's a compromiser.’ Well, what's wrong with that? We sometimes have to give an inch, but giving an inch here can mean gaining a couple of yards there.”
   

4. A Florida law guarantees the right to chew a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.
   In 2013, in Maryland, a child was suspended from school for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun and pretending to shoot other kids with it. When Hammer heard about this, Spies says in episode three, “The Hardliners,” “she was outraged and decided that it was necessary to get a law passed in the state of Florida that would provide legal protections to children who not only chewed pastries into the shapes of guns, but also like any number of other things that involved like pretend shooting.”
   

5. Every day, Columbine’s former principal recites the names of the 13 people murdered at his school in 1999.
   “Before my feet hit the ground, I recite the names of my beloved 13, and they give me the reason to do what I’m doing today,” Frank DeAngelis tells Graff in episode one, “A Uniquely American Problem.” DeAngelis stayed in his role as Columbine’s principal until 2014, fulfilling a promise to stay long enough to graduate every student in the community who was touched by the massacre. After retirement, working with other survivors became his main focus. DeAngelis co-founded the Principal Recovery Network in 2019.
   

6. Campaigning on gun regulation is now a winning political strategy.
   We’ve all seen The Onion’s joke headline that circulates after every mass shooting: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” But Senator Chris Murphy isn’t laughing, and he’s not convinced it’s true. A member of Congress representing Newtown, Conn., the site of the 2012 Sandy Hook School shooting, Murphy has dedicated his public service to addressing the gun violence epidemic. And he’s seen a corner turned: “Once Democrats started really leading on the issue of guns,” he says in episode six, “Generation Lockdown,” “we started winning all sorts of unexpected races.... What I learned was that the conventional wisdom on guns had just been wrong.” This is a new trend in America, he says. “I’m fascinated by how quickly that conventional wisdom has changed.”

In the final episode, Graff notes, “At long last, it seemed the nation’s sense of what was ‘reasonable’ when it came to gun rights was changing.” Despite the decades of pain and suffering, he reports that there’s legitimate reason for hope that the U.S. can resolve its intractable gun problem. “After decades of watching the Second Amendment move to the fore of American life… as the country weighed questions of individual rights and community safety, perhaps America didn’t have to live like this forever,” he notes.

It’s a tough listen, to be sure, but this season of Long Shadow ends on a hopeful note. Give it a listen, and let us know if you walk away with hope, yourself.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

Do you remember where you were during the Columbine High School massacre? It’s not the usual “where were you?” question that people ask. But many Americans can recall exactly where they were 25 years ago this month. That’s because the unimaginable happened on April 20, 1999, and it changed, well, everything.

Pulitzer finalist historian, journalist, and podcast host Garrett M. Graff remembers the day clearly. “I was in my own senior year of high school, home on my April school vacation that week. We didn't have social media to hear of breaking news, and cell phones weren't that common in early 1999,” he tells listeners in the first episode of Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust, released on all major podcast platforms today.

“Instead, I heard the news from my dad who was a reporter for the Associated Press in Vermont, who called the house phone in the kitchen to tell me to turn on the news,” Garrett adds.

It was at this the moment that the U.S. unknowingly entered the era of mass shootings. A quarter century later, the horrors of Columbine and all the gun violence since — much of it in public areas once considered safe havens, including schools, movie theaters, and houses of worship — have irrevocably altered our country in plenty of ways.

To be clear, Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust is not solely about the tragedy at Columbine. The podcast covers historical events large and small to tell the story of story of a uniquely American problem: How did the U.S. become both a bastion of freedom and a land of lockdowns? How did we become so divided over guns? And how can we ever find a way forward?

It takes listeners on a journey spanning generations of U.S. history to tell the stories of people who changed America’s relationship to guns, for better or worse.

Listen to episode one of Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust.

With each new season of Long Shadow, Long Lead aims to raise the bar. Season one, 9/11’s Lingering Questions, won a Signal Award for Best History Podcast. Last season’s Rise of the American Far Right is competing for a Webby Award in the Best Limited Series Podcast, News & Politics category — and it remains shockingly relevant a year after its release, as another Trump presidential campaign leaks even more vitriolic rhetoric into the political atmosphere.

This season, reported in collaboration with non-profit gun violence newsroom The Trace, In Guns We Trust tells the story of America’s gun violence epidemic with unparalleled authority. From inside the halls of Congress to behind the scenes at the NRA, The Trace’s award-winning journalists have covered this vital topic better than anyone else, and Long Lead is proud to highlight their work and voices.

Support great in-depth journalism. Vote for Long Lead!

Long Lead earned three Webby nominations in three different types of media, which is quite the feat. Our mission is to produce the highest-quality journalism, without compromise. Help us raise the bar in news — vote for our productions, today:

Long Shadow: Rise of the American Far Right, Best Limited Series Podcast, News & Politics

The Catch: Best Individual Editorial Feature
Lifting Ukraine: Best Use of Photography

Long Shadow continues to be produced in partnership with Campside Media, whose podcasting mastery has both delighted and challenged listeners with some of the medium’s best shows. We’re also proud to add PRX to this season’s credits. PRX is one of the world’s top podcast publishers, public radio distributors, and audio producers and is shaping a vibrant future for creative and journalistic audio. We’re honored that Long Shadow now is a part of it.

We understand how challenging it can be to listen to a show like Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust, but we know it’s a conversation we should be having nationally — especially in an election year. It can be a hopeful discussion, as Garrett reveals in an interview with Parker Molloy in Long Lead’s Depth Perception newsletter. “Change is slow, it’s not as fast as we would like,” he says. “But there is hope for America to be smarter about guns and to enact some smart gun safety legislation and rules.”

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

PS: Don’t forget to read Garrett Graff’s newsletter Doomsday Scenario. In addition to getting Garrett’s thoughts on Long Shadow, you’ll get behind-the-scenes information on his books which range from an oral history of 9/11 to the inside story of the U.S. government’s search for alien life. His next book, When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day, publishes June 4 and is available for pre-order now.

Long Lead’s latest production profiles fitness influencer and record-setting powerlifter Anna Kurkurina, a woman dedicated to rescuing homeless pets displaced by war since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

It’s a true multimedia experience. Photojournalist Maranie R. Staab captured intimate video and photos over the span of a year, highlighting Kurkurina's day-to-day struggles and triumphs. From capturing displaced pets on the streets of Mykolaiv to preparing breakfast for her many furry houseguests, Lifting Ukraine is rich with tender moments of a woman caring for her community against the backdrop of war. 

Learn more about Maranie Staab’s experience reporting “Lifting Ukraine” in the latest edition of Depth Perception.

Subscribe to Depth Perception

Kurkurina is a humanitarian powerhouse both in and outside the gym. In addition to rescuing and rehabilitating pets, she juggles teaching all-female fitness classes, providing strength training to folks with cerebral palsy, and tapping her massive social media following for supplies and resources to continue her animal-rescue efforts. 

This production is special for another reason: Lifting Ukraine is Long Lead’s debut photo essay. Incorporating a classic photojournalistic approach visually layered in a complex and compelling way, this production christens our new visual-forward multimedia platform. 

After months of curation and careful design with our partners Decimal Studios, we’ve developed a dynamic platform that truly puts imagery first — a feat which newsrooms have struggled with for decades in the digital space. Whether you’re immersing yourself in the story on desktop, mobile, or tablet, you’re in for a treat.

In true Long Lead fashion, we saw an antiquated newsroom norm — digital photo essays where images are small, uniform, and flanked with ads — and flipped it on its head. We hope our new platform enriches the user experience, and even more, I hope it piques the interest of photojournalists with longform photo essays they’ve been unable to find the perfect home for. If that’s you, pitch me. Let’s tell visual stories better.

So long for now,

Sarah Rogers

Creative Director, Long Lead

Here’s a peek behind the curtain: Host Garrett Graff wanted to end the second season of Long Shadow on a hopeful note, but the problem was that there was no hope to be found. We weren’t even sure there was an ending.

A Pulitzer-finalist historian whose accounts of ground-shaking U.S. events have been called “dazzling” and “standard setting” by critics, Garrett knows how to finish a story. In wrapping the grueling first season covering 9/11’s lingering questions, he pulled out a pair of aces in telling the tales of two men who survived the Twin Towers’ collapse.

But Long Shadow’s second season, which chronicles the rise of the American far right, was different. This movement culminated on January 6, 2021, but did it end there? Three years after that day, we still can’t answer this question.

“The power of longform journalism is that when it’s done right, it has staying power,” writes Parker Molloy in the latest issue of Depth Perception, Long Lead’s newsletter exploring the world of in-depth reporting. Survive 2024’s impending media hellscape: Subscribe here.

If you’ve listened to Long Shadow’s second season in its entirety, you know the story is far from over. The seven-episode limited series is more than just a primer on how we got here. It helps listeners recognize far-right rhetoric and understand how and why it’s still being used today. 

By listening to Long Shadow, you will learn how the past 40 years of American history gave way to the rise of the American far right. You’ll begin to recognize the coded language Trump uses to rally his base. You’ll realize why Trump’s Republican political opponents like Ron DeSantis, who said he would “slit the throats” of federal bureaucrats, are attacking the “deep state.” And you’ll understand why candidates like Nikki Haley, who refused to declare slavery the cause of the U.S. Civil War, and Vivek Ramaswamy, who embraces wild conspiracy theories, are playing footsie with the facts.

If you haven’t listened yet, but want to start today, I’d recommend jumping right to Long Shadow’s second-season finale. In “Jan. 6: Day of the Rope,” Garrett not only provides an unforgettable tick-tock of the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he also explores what the insurgency means for the country as it attempts to move forward.

“A decision looms on our horizon,” he says in the episode’s waning minutes. “Are we going to reject white nationalism and right-wing political violence, or are we going to turn away while it consumes our democracy? The time to make that choice is closer than you think.”

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Four months before January 6, 2021, COVID-skeptics resisting Germany’s public health mandates stormed their country’s parliament. The event was eerily prescient — if only Americans had been watching.

For more, read “Querdenken Everything” Long Lead’s award-winning, interactive feature by Darren Loucaides with illustrations by Jun Cen.

We named this podcast “Long Shadow” (despite the considerable confusion it would cause Long Lead) because that term best describes how historic moments can loom over current events. But the decades that foreshadowed January 6 may be even more important than the consequences of that day. Time will tell. 

“Now, more than ever before, we are in the shadow cast across history by the far right,” Garrett says in Long Shadow’s season two finale. “If there’s light at the end of this tunnel, it’s that the U.S. government has finally taken a real and sustained interest in the domestic terrorism threat posed by it.” Here’s hoping they can put a stop to it.

Subscribe to the Signal Award-winning, #1-charting history series Long Shadow wherever you get your podcasts.

So long for now,

John Patrick Pullen

Founding Editor, Long Lead

P.S.: We want to hear from you about how to make this newsletter better. Please take less than 5 minutes of your day to answer our reader survey by Monday, January 8.

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So long, for now… and see you in 2024,

Heather Muse
Audience Development Director, Long Lead