Nonfiction Pizza Party

The Writearound is sort of like the journalism version of Inside The Actors Studio.Jonah Weiner, whose beard rivals that of James Lipton, contributes to Slate and Rolling Stone, and he started the Writearound in 2011 by posting audio interviews with his contemporaries online. As a nonfiction nerd, I was thrilled. There are plenty of options for comedy and sports podcasts, but I haven't found another solid writing series. White guy problems!This summer Weiner switched the Writearound's format from audio to print transcripts and I was all, “C'mon bro, I need something to listen to while I cook dinner. Okay, okay, Hot Pockets and Facebook.”I emailed Weiner about the change and he responded, “I am a better editor of text than I am of audio, i.e. I was more confident I could properly polish one than the other; also I realized that with the growing popularity of Longreads/Instapaper etc., raw text might be more user-friendly.”Writearound has featured Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker, as well as a transcript of Weiner's interview with Louis C.K. for his Rolling Stone profile. The dialogue isn't focused on writing, but seriously, it's Louis C.K. Did you see the last episode? Except for the fact that it's fictionalized, Louie is a visual lyric essay. (Does that make C.K. John D'Agata?)In the first Writearound, Weiner talks to Alex “Fresh mozzarella as soft and pale as an angel's boob” Pappademas. He's written some of my favorite celebrity stories for GQ and the New York Times Magazine. Much of Writearound can be taken as an argument for the validity of the celebrity profile. At their worst, celeb pieces are surface ordinary-as-extraordinary stories. Channing Tatum [tens of readers exhale] likes coffee and yoga just like you, but he's also extraordinarily lucky, or good looking, or talented. But when the profile meets art/cultural critique and the fact that the subject's life is bizarre is a given, then how he deals with that life becomes a human story.I learned of Weiner through his piece, “Kanye West Has a Goblet,” where he used the rapper's Tweets as source material. This was post-Taylor Swift, when West swore off interviews. The result, included in The Best American Magazine Writing 2011, acts as a celebrity profile while poking at the form: “”˜Fur pillows are hard to actually sleep on,' Kanye West tells me [quotes and details link to their source]. It's just before noon on an overcast Sunday in late July, and West has invited me into his Manhattan apartment.”This type of story would lose much of its power printed on paper, instead of online. Sometimes I forget change can be a good thing too.--David Bersell

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