Podcast Interview with Nathan Thornburgh and David Caswell

By Matt Tullis

This week’s episode has three segments, starting with Nathan Thornburgh, a chief editor and publisher of the website roadsandkingdoms.com. Thornburgh spent much of the last decade as a foreign correspondent and editor for TIME Magazine. He’s reported on everything from cyber war in Russia to information wars in Georgia – not the state Georgia, by the way — to drug wars in Juarez. He also co-founded the parenting blog DadWagon.

We’re going to talk about his story, “The Root of All Things.” Mike Wilson mentioned the story in Episode 34 and said he had been told about the piece by one of his reporters at the Dallas Morning News. The story will appear in the Fall 2015 issue of River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction. 

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In the second segment, I talk with David Caswell. Caswell has created a new news database called Structured Stories. He hopes the database will empower everyone to collect, use and improve a permanent record of news events.

Finally, the third segment will be something new called “Required Reading.” This week, I’ll tell you about two stories I’ve recently read that I think everyone should also read. The stories are “Ballad of the Sad Climatologists,” by John H. Richardson, which ran in Esquire. The other story is “The Really Big One,” by Katherine Schultz, which ran in The New Yorker.

In the future, though, we hope podcast listeners will contribute to this segment. We’ll have more posted on the website about how to get involved.