William Finnegan is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.

“I suppose in retrospect I was just trying to find out what the world held that nobody could tell me about until I got there. I was a big reader and had a couple of degrees by that point, but there was something not well over the horizon that I wanted to get near and record and understand, and I even felt like it would transform me.”

Thanks to TinyLetter, SquareSpace, and The Great Courses for sponsoring this week's episode.



Show Notes:


Finnegan on Longform
Finnegan's New Yorker archive
[6:00] "Playing Doc's Games" (New Yorker • Aug 1992)
[8:00] Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid (Persea • 1986)
[37:00] "The Emergency" (New Yorker • May 1989) [sub req'd]
[38:00] "Getting The Story" (New Yorker • June 1987) [sub req'd]
[40:00] "A Theft in The Library" (New Yorker • Oct 2005) [sub req'd]
[41:00] "Tears of the Sun: A Fortune at the Top of the World" (New Yorker • Apr 2015)
[49:00] Of a Fire on the Moon (Norman Mailer • Grove Press • 1985)