Switchyard

Switchyard is a podcast for people hungry for eye-opening essays, moving fiction, soul-stirring poetry, and honest, thought-provoking conversation. Join us monthly for new content.

This Land: Oklahoma’s Past, America’s Future 10/13/2025

This Land: Oklahoma’s Past, America’s Future In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode, Rebecca Nagle and Caleb Gayle discuss how Oklahoma's peculiar history both stands apart from and seems to encapsulate the history of America. Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning journalist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She is the author of By The Fire We Carry: The Generation-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land and the writer and host of the podcast This Land. Her writing on Native representation, federal Indian law, and tribal sovereignty has been featured in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, The Guardian, USA Today, and Indian Country Today. She is the recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, Women’s Media Center’s Exceptional Journalism Award, a Peabody nomination, and numerous awards from the Indigenous Journalist Association. Caleb Gayle is the author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creek, American Identity, and Power and Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State. He is an award-winning journalist who writes about race and identity and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Three Penny Review, Guernica, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Pacific Standard, and The New Republic. He serves as a Senior Fellow and Professor of Practice at Northeastern University as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Arthur Carter Journalism Institute at NYU. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38567400

Immersion: What Media Gets Wrong by Not Going Deep 10/13/2025

Immersion: What Media Gets Wrong by Not Going Deep In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode, we hear from Ted Conover, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Christopher Leonard, and Elliott Woods with responses from Theodore Ross and Esther Honig. Ted Conover the award-winning author of Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders with America’s Mexican Migrants, and several other works. He has also written for The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s. He is a professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of over twenty books in poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. He is a Visiting Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa and an alumnus of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. Lansana is Executive Producer of KOSU’s Focus: Black Oklahoma, a monthly radio program, which has received a duPont-Columbia Award, a NAACP Image Award, and a Peabody Award nomination. Christopher Leonard is a business reporter and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Fortune, and Time magazine. He is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Lords of Easy Money, The Meat Racket, and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. He is the founder and director of the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri, a nonprofit investigative reporting center. Elliott Woods is the host of Third Squad, an Edward R. Murrow Award-winning podcast about the Afghanistan War. He has covered America's post-9/11 wars, veterans' issues, politics, humanitarian crises, right-wing extremism, and the environment for numerous publications, including Texas Monthly, The New Republic, Outside Magazine, and Wired. His work has received an Overseas Press Club Award, a National Magazine Award, and a Chairman's Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Theodore Ross is the editor-in-chief of the Food & Environment Reporting Network. He is an editor, writer, and television and audio producer with more than twenty years of experience at national publications, websites, and productions. He was an executive editor of The New Republic, and an editor at Harper’s and Men’s Journal. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Atlantic, VICE, and Businessweek. Esther Honig’s work focuses on the intersection of agriculture and immigration. Her work has been published by The Nation, Snap Judgment, Latino USA, NPR, and Mother Jones. She is a recipient of the UC Berkeley 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship and her work has been recognized by the Edward R. Murrow Awards and the Society for Professional Journalists. She is a producer for StoryCorps where she helps everyday people tell their own profound and illuminating stories. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38567365

Merchants of Fear: Stirring Hatred for Political Gain 10/13/2025

Merchants of Fear: Stirring Hatred for Political Gain In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode, we hear from Siddhartha Deb, Ralph Eubanks, C.J. Janovy, and Patrick Phillips with responses from Eliza Barclay and Jenny Casas. Siddhartha Deb, author of Twilight Prisoners: The Rise of the Hindu Right and the Fall of India. His fiction and nonfiction have been longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and been awarded the Pen Open prize and the 2024 Anthony Veasna So Fiction prize. His journalism and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, Dissent, The Baffler, N+1, and Caravan. Ralph Eubanks is the author of A Place Like Mississippi: A Journey Through A Real and Imagined Literary Landscape, Ever Is a Long Time, The House at the End of the Road, andd When It’s Darkness on the Delta: An American Reckoning. His work focuses on race, identity, and the American South, and has appeared in Vanity Fair, The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, and The New Yorker. He is a 2007 Guggenheim fellow, a 2021-2022 Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellow, and the recipient of a 2023 Mississippi Governor’s Arts Award. C.J. Janovy is the author of No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas, which won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ nonfiction. She is director of content at Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, and spent a decade as editor of the city’s alt-weekly. Her work has also been published by Switchyard, Catapult, NPR, New Letters, Ms., and the New York Times. Patrick Phillips is the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. He is also the author of four books of poems, including Elegy for a Broken Machine, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a recent fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. He teaches writing and literature at Stanford. Eliza Barclay is the climate editor for New York Times Opinion where she commissions and edits guest essays on climate, environment and food issues. In 2024, she curated and edited the series “What to Eat on a Burning Planet” about how lawmakers, scientists, farmers and consumers can confront and solve the growing strain on our global food supply and the natural systems it depends on. She was the science, health and climate editor at Vox, where she co-wrote and co-edited the award-winning “supertrees” project. Jenny Casas is a senior radio editor for Reveal. She was previously a narrative audio producer at the New York Times. Before that, she reported on the ways that cities systematically fail their people, for WNYC Studios, USA Today, City Bureau, and St. Louis Public Radio. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38567190

The Place of Literature: A Roundtable Discussion 10/13/2025

The Place of Literature: A Roundtable Discussion In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode, Jennifer Sahn leads a conversation with Sindya Bhanoo, Michael Croley, Donovan Hohn, and Antonio Ruiz-Camacho about the role of literature in a new era of political division. Sahn is the editor-in-chief of High Country News, a magazine about the American West. She previously served as executive editor of Pacific Standard and as editor of Orion before that. Her work has been recognized by the National Magazine Awards, Utne Independent Press Awards, Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Prize, John Burroughs Essay Awards, and the Best American Series anthologies. Sindya Bhanoo is the author of Seeking Fortune Elsewhere (Catapult), a story collection that won the Oregon Book Award, New American Voices Award, and Writers League of Texas Award. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and Sergio Troncosco Award, and longlisted for the Carnegie Medal and The Story Prize. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, New England Review, and Glimmer Train. She is a recipient of an O. Henry Award, the Disquiet Literary Prize, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers’ conferences. A former reporter for the New York Times and the Washington Post, Sindya was a 2020 Knight-Wallace Fellow and has earned recognition from the Pulitzer Center and Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Michael Croley is the author of Any Other Place: Stories, winner of the James Still Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His reporting, essays, and stories have appeared in Esquire, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Golfer’s Journal, Golf Digest, The Paris Review, and Switchyard. He teaches creative writing at Denison University. Donovan Hohn is the author of The Inner Coast: Essays and Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea, a New York Times Notable Book. His essays have appeared in Harper's, New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly. A recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, Hohn spent several years editing essays, fiction, and literary journalism at Harper’s, has taught nonfiction in the MFA program of the University of Michigan, and is now Director of Creative Writing at Wayne State University in Detroit. Antonio Ruiz-Camacho is the author of the short story collection Barefoot Dogs, winner of the Jesse H. Jones award from the Texas Institute of Letters. A National Magazine Award finalist, his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, Salon, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, Electric Literature, and Switchyard. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38563150

Echo Chambers: The Destructive Effects of Silos and Misinformation 10/13/2025

Echo Chambers: The Destructive Effects of Silos and Misinformation In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode, we hear from Gal Beckerman, Benjamin Peters, Peter Slevin, and Siva Vaidhyanathan with responses from Alec MacGillis and Maddie Oatman. Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, The New Republic and Bookforum. He is the author of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas and When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone. Benjamin Peters is an author and media scholar at the University of Tulsa. His books include How Not to Network a Nation: the Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet, Your Computer is on Fire, and Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society & Culture. He is currently writing on the Soviet prehistory to AI and Russian hackers. Peter Slevin is a Northwestern University professor and contributing writer for The New Yorker who spent a decade on the national staff of The Washington Post. His career as a reporter has taken him around the country and the globe, where he has covered events and personalities of every description, taking particular interest in telling stories rich with the voices of the people involved. His ambitious biography of Michelle Obama was voted one of the best biographies of the year by PEN America, and was translated into Chinese, Korean and Dutch. Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Googlization of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) and Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. His work spans academia, journalism, and media, with writings featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and The Guardian, where he is a regular columnist. He also directs projects like the Democracy Lab and podcasts at UVA's Center for Media and Citizenship. Alec MacGillis is a reporter at ProPublica, where his focus in recent years has included gun violence, economic inequality and the post-pandemic crisis in public education. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic. He is currently a fellow in the Watchdog Writers Group at the University of Missouri. Maddie Oatman is a writer and editor based in San Francisco, covering a wide range of subjects including culture, science, justice, and people's relationship to place. She is an award-winning senior editor at Mother Jones. Her work has appeared in High Country News, Outside, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is a 2024-2025 BookEnds fellow. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38559625

The Forgotten Man: Reporting on Class, Race, and Poverty in America 10/13/2025

The Forgotten Man: Reporting on Class, Race, and Poverty in America In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode, we hear from Mya Frazier, Joe Kloc, Tracie McMillan, and Monica Potts with responses from Gary Lee and Paul Reyes. Mya Frazier is an award-winning investigative journalist based in the Midwest. Her work focuses on the power of the U.S. financial system in the lives of low-income Americans. She has written features and cover stories on credit scoring, housing insecurity, and inequality for The New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine. She is at work on a book for Knopf about the history of the U.S. credit scoring system and is the program director at the Watchdog Writers Group. Joe Kloc is a reporter and senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, where he was a finalist for the 2019 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. His work has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, New York magazine, and the New York Review of Books. Author of a book Lost at Sea about the “anchor-outs”—an unhoused community living off the California coast on abandoned boats Tracie McMillan covers America’s multiracial working class for the New York Times, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and the Village Voice. A one time target of Rush Limbaugh, she is the author of the New York Times bestseller The American Way of Eating and The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America. Monica Potts is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America. Her previous work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic. Gary Lee is the editor of the Oklahoma Eagle and the director of the Tulsa Local News Initiative. Lee is the former Moscow Bureau Chief for the Washington Post. Paul Reyes is the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review and author of Exiles in Eden: Life Among the Ruins of Florida's Great Recession. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38559450

The Slow Civil War: What Happens Now? 10/13/2025

The Slow Civil War: What Happens Now? In January 2025, just after the Inauguration of President Donald Trump, Switchyard organized a gathering of journalists from across the country to discuss how we would go about covering the new administration. We gathered together the biographers of Michelle Obama and Mitch McConnell, authors of books about the Koch Brothers and The Family, about Amazon and Google and Facebook, about the rise of white supremacy and the cash value of racism. We featured writers and editors for the New York Times, the LA Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones, for StoryCorps, This American Life, and Reveal. We also had musicians, filmmakers, novelists, essayists, and poets. As we had hoped, the gathering was a source of solace, a call to action and a chance to recommit ourselves to our values and best practices and a rekindling of our belief in the power of storytelling, in all its forms. In these unprecedented and difficult times, we are once again reporting on a president who characterizes journalists as enemies of the state and jokes about killing us. And he empowers and emboldens state and local level officials to indulge their most authoritarian impulses. Here, in the heart of Tulsa, on the grounds of the Tulsa Race Massacre and the end of the Trail of Tears, we have state officials who have sought to block the teaching of that history while requiring schools to buy Bibles branded with the new president’s name. The solemn question each of our panels addressed: What are we going to do now? In this live episode we hear from Jeff Sharlet and Molly O’Toole with a response from Mazin Sidahmed. Jeff has given years to studying what he calls “the slow civil war,” the dividing of the country and the rise of an angry, aggrieved, alienated ultra right wing. Molly has reported on Trump’s immigration policies and their effects on migrants and their families. She’s completing a book that documents her journeys alongside people traversing the Darien Gap and making their way north over hundreds and thousands of miles to the U.S. border. Mazin, who leads the Q&A, co-founded and co-directs the groundbreaking immigration news site Documented. /episode/index/show/2536b59e-912b-4c35-9e7e-335c31c1b527/id/38559425