Leon Neyfakh
@leoncrawl
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PROLOGUE PROJECTS / host on FIASCO + BACKFIRED + THINK TWICE / co-creator of SLOW BURN http:/www.prologueprojects.com
New York
Joined July 2008
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Pinned Tweet
We have a new podcast out today on
@audible_com
called BACKFIRED: THE VAPING WARS. In a sense I started working on it when I was in 5th grade and stole one of my mom's Capri Ultra Lights and smoked it in the basement. Very minty and slimming
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how to listen to a podcast:
- zone out
- rewind 30 seconds to find bearings
- rewind again until you hear something from when you were still paying attention
- zone out again bc you’ve already heard this part
- look at twitter + forget to start paying attention again
- repeat
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🥂
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just heard from a slow burn listener whose parents hosted the nixon '72 fundraiser in hollywood that john and martha mitchell attended right after the watergate break-in. listener's dad remembers MM telling him privately, "you have no idea what's about to happen" 😍
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RIP linda tripp. this was taken during a break from our marathon interview in the spring of '18. i was worried that i'd have to be fake to her, but her willingness to engage on every question i asked, and to empathize w people who hate her, made it easy to be authentic
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still cool
Friend Who Listened To Podcast On Watergate Bursts Into Conversation With Guns Fucking Blazing
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i am tickled beyond belief to see that
@TheDailyShow
+
@jonfavs
have produced a parody of slow burn: a deep dive into the obama latte scandal
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IMO the "bad art friend" story is not actually about “who owns stories”... it's about the varieties of being annoying (and the varieties of being dishonest) and the line between personality defects + mental illness. and how "we" deal with people who are somewhere in between
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snooze button logic
People close to her say one reason - perhaps not only one - is that she was aware how awful life would/will be for her on the outside after defending his policies for a long tome.
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2 months ago we launched FIASCO season 3, a podcast about the civil rights movement arriving in Boston, a Northern city where many thought it didn't belong. In our finale, two men who defined the nat'l debate on school segregation: Ed Brooke and Joe Biden
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have seen a couple people say they can't fathom spending 250k on a podcast... the truth is if you're doing original reporting, and are doing a remotely thorough job while not underpaying people + forcing insane hours, it costs way more
this was a very interesting/ clarifying article about the economics of making narrative podcasts
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"the best reason to think there won’t be an escalation to a major ground war is that both countries have leaders who are comfortable lying to their populations. as long as the situation remains contained, both sides can say whatever they want about it"
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watching ER for the first time while on parental leave and i think if this show was released today, w/ no changes except it ran on HBO and had 12 eps per season instead of 25, people would lose their minds. best writing, totally insane story structure, stuff you "never see on TV"
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SLOW BURN TV IS COMING
produced by LEFT/RIGHT, the studio that also made the TAL adaptation for showtime and the new NYT show based on the daily
video footage of martha mitchell alone worth the price of admission. i am narrator
just announced: the six-part slow burn docuseries will debut on
@EPIXHD
on sunday november 24
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finished THE KNICK over the weekend and it freaks me out that something so good, so original, and so stacked w star power can have such a low cultural profile. what chance does anyone have to break thru the noise if not even this show could do it? and what else is out there...?
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me, trying to impress my 20-year-old sister: “did you see drake is putting out his album next week?”
her: “i don’t listen to drake. he’s too much of a bitch to me.”
i asked her permission to post this and she said “you can @ him too”
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a question i have for the people who have read 50+ books over the course of the year — literally when do you do it? in the morning before work? right after work, before you eat dinner? before you fall asleep? exactly when does this reading happen
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given how erratic he is, it's v striking how consistently he uses the word "perfect" to describe the call!
also... in this context the word implies guilt, right? like, he thinks it was "perfect" in the sense that he did a perfect job of not overtly revealing his true intent...?
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just bought beer, candy, and chips at a gas station and said to the guy, “just the essentials today” and he didn’t even smile
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honestly he doesn’t get enough credit for being a true eccentric!
To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings
@CNN
purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!
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i'e said it before but it bears repeating... it's super funny that the easiest way to make a PDF out of a word doc is to pretend you want to print it out
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it's crazy that the best way to make a PDF in word is to pretend you want to print something out
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hadn't checked in a while, and am happy to see that after 5 months of weekly shows,
@fivefourpod
remains the
#1
government podcast on
@ApplePodcasts
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Today we released what early listeners have told me is their favorite episode of FIASCO: THE BATTLE FOR BOSTON. It's the story of Ted Landsmark, a Black lawyer who in 1976 was attacked on camera by a white protestor wielding an American flag. Listen here:
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amazing: whitney bleeped out "p*dcast" so p*dcasters wouldn't find her tweet and reply to it with self-promotion. little did she know i would be searching for mentions of "fiasco" and "slow burn" to signal boost. self-promotion finds a way
Ok, I'm going to be that person. Any p*dcast recommendations? I just finished Slow Burn, Fiasco, and am in the middle of Blowback. Something in that broad genre would be great!
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@MattZeitlin
there’s not really any reason to compare them or think of them as occupying you the same lane! you wouldn’t compare a late night talk show with a feature length documentary
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my one regret about leaving behind slow burn? that i will never get to bring to life my idea for an april fools special called SICK BURN, in which we'd dissect a legendary insult from history
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Why did the AIDS epidemic unfold the way it did, and why has it been allowed to kill more than 30 million people worldwide?
FIASCO: THE AIDS CRISIS, an eight-part series from the co-creators of SLOW BURN, premieres March 24 on
@audible_com
.
Trailer:
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“a good portion of our listenership [is] law students and young practitioners. and that just comes from the experience of going to law school and being surrounded by the dissonance and what it does to your brain." it's
@fivefourpod
in
@FortuneMagazine
:
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eye-opening thread about how some folks are solving the problem of narrative podcasts being expensive and inefficient to produce
This podcast series is a shameless rip-off of my
@TheAtlantic
story from last April. No credit is given and the creator did zero original reporting. He even mispronounces the main character's name through all 8 episodes. (It's "kuh-SEE," not "KEY-see.") 🧵
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if i understand the term correctly, kornacki is "competence porn" but real. it's kinda heartening that everyone just likes the guy who obviously knows the most stuff, thinks the most clearly, and never resorts to bullshitting!
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90% of the time i spend "writing" is taking sentences that start with "although" and dividing them into two sentences where the second one starts with "but"
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among the people developing these lists, apparently, is barbara ledeen, whose husband michael played a key role in establishing contact b/w the reagan white house and manuchar ghorbanifar, the iranian fixer who facilitated the arms-for-hostages deal at the center of iran-contra
The Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them — according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the effort.
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@ezwrites
i didn't know actors hated may december but that makes sense! a friend said it's "about a bad actress" and i thought that was right on
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damn — can hardly believe this, the
@NewYorker
says THINK TWICE: MICHAEL JACKSON was the best podcast of 2023
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this is by far the most satisfying answer to the question "why do hollywood executives love optioning podcasts so much all of a sudden"
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anyone who claims/implies that the axios interview is subtantively "embarrassing" to trump (let alone "damaging") should be forced to explain what they mean / whose reaction they're imagining
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a disease: sitting down to edit for structure/big picture narrative coherence but then repeatedly deciding to stop and spend time rearranging sentences so they sound incrementally better. no known cure
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while we're on the subject of impeachment... the SLOW BURN docuseries, based on the watergate season and hosted by moi, will premiere FEBRUARY 16 on
@EPIXHD
fun thing: got this guy in for an interview about ratfucking before he got too busy
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enjoying the implication here that a yale man is self-evidently above drug deals
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coming out of a v happy twitter hibernation with some v happy news to share about the podcast i've been working on: FIASCO is coming to
@hearluminary
this spring
With shows from Lena Dunham, Conan O’Brien, Malcolm Gladwell and Trevor Noah, Luminary aims to be the Netflix of podcasts
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article i published in my high school newspaper ten days after 9/11
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did not know till just now that lamar alexander was a protege/legislative assistant to howard baker, the republican senator famous for bellowing "what did the president know and when did he know it?" during the watergate hearings
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v possible i am out of touch but it strains my imagination to think "millions of people" had any concept of where alec baldwin's wife was from before this happened...
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still can't believe this happened, and on the memorial episode no less. RIP alex trebek! reposting with an image that doesn't look fake:
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just lost 100 dollars in a bet thinking “praise you” was by moby :(
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B
E
New season of FIASCO
G
Heading your way soon
A trailer is out now
Z
It's good
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i'm gonna be honest, i was kinda half-bullshitting over the past month when insisting FIASCO: BUSH v. GORE would be a relevant thing to listen to going into 2020, but i gotta say... i really do think i understand what's happening on a different level knowing that story in detail
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@fivefourpod
get those resumés ready
Biden: "If elected, what I will do is I’ll put together a national commission – a bipartisan commission...and I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system...it’s not about court packing."
Listen to his full answer:
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is it normal to be brought to tears reading the monthly newsletter from my 8-month-old child's daycare? "this month our children will embrace vegetables as part of our gardening theme. they will sing along with buzzing bees and pull out a carrot to make their own soup"
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trump's twitter account right now, with each of the false claims bleeped out by twitter, is about as legible as the radio edit of WAP
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i was only vaguely aware of the ruth shalit story until this latest round, but i feel like i know enough to say this is a bummer for anyone who believes in second chances... imagine discrediting not just yourself but the very concept of redemption
Late last night The Atlantic attached an editor's note to its story on niche sports, saying that author Ruth Shalit Barrett "deceived" the magazine about the central person in the narrative, a woman ID'd as "Sloane":
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i read all the pieces on ezra klein, and while i get why they focused on his influence, i was surprised that — aside from the federer quote from richard plepler — none of them got at the insane density of precise + original observations the guy makes while speaking off the cuff
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i wish i knew who is lying and who is deluded. wouldn't really change anything but i'm just so disturbed that i can't remotely tell with most of them
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@jonathanvswan
@jdawsey1
this is the problem with all the calls for dems to be more "ruthless"/aggressive — when they do it, they get policed + shamed in a way the other side never does. IMO bauer projecting confidence like this is a low stakes way to chip away at any emerging sense that the race is over
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an argument i've heard while interviewing ppl about iran-contra for fiasco 2 is that the scandal didn't "catch on" or leave a big cultural mark bc it was international in scope
not convinced that's correct but if it is you gotta wonder if the same principle will hold for ukraine
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when i was ~7 i loved the movie "hair" so much i bought the libretto to read on vacation. one night i sat on a pier singing the words to "sodomy," my angelic voice carrying the obscenities across the lake. my dad told me to stop and i wouldn't so he threw the book in a bonfire
My kid is singing the F-word without knowing what it means. Should I stop her?
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5-4 in teen vogue
Constitutional originalism dictates how much of our Supreme Court interprets our laws. But where did it start? And is it even valid?
I learned from the best, including experts at
@fivefourpod
+
@WeDemandJustice
, for this
@TeenVogue
story:
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there's been a good run of press recently for the work coming out of prologue projects. if you'll indulge me:
in the
@NewYorker
today, a big piece on
@fivefourpod
that calls the show "funny, forceful, + expressly designed to cut through layers of jargon"
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very excited to announce that FIASCO SEASON 2: IRAN-CONTRA is coming to
@hearluminary
on february 6.
8 episodes, released weekly
the story of a secret war, a secret deal, and a scandal that threatened to destroy the reagan presidency—until it didn’t
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remembering today how i interviewed wes anderson during the press-run around "grand budapest hotel," and he refused to accept or engage w the idea that his movies had anything in common with each other. so annoying
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maiden voyage in our new studio, recording the first cut of the trailer for fiasco 😼
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NPR says watch slow burn tonight
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if george conway was our martha mitchell, he would have let us interview him for season 2...
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at times like this, it's worth mentioning, and telling one's friends, that there's a good podcast called
@fivefourpod
, whose official tagline is "a podcast about how much the supreme court sucks"
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@JHWeissmann
because everyone who went to yale law SHOULD go into a high-paying corporate job in order to pay off their loans, instead of doing something pro-social that pays less? that has always struck me as a flaw of the system, not a feature
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how did al gore manage to lose florida to george w bush in 2000? but also, how did he manage to almost win it?
FIASCO episode 1, about what happened in florida before everything else that happened in florida, is out now. hear it free at
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embarrassed to realize that what has finally broken my twitter habit is not the quality of my timeline, but the fact that, for whatever reason, none of my tweets ever get "traction" anymore. i'm trying to promote a fuckin podcast over here
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the problem with putting salt on a hard-boiled egg? can’t see the salt well enough to not oversalt it. makes you think
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peter from 5-4 got fired from his job because his podcast got too big and successful. excellent interview by
@nwquah
about how it went down and what it means for the future of the show
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just had a horrifying moment of imagining a group of young people who regard their group texts as a form of a social media
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sometimes i listen to the podcasts people seem to like and i wonder if we’re trying too hard. depressing
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me: that guy has kids? he comes across as so immature on twitter
alice: doesn’t everyone? are you ever like, ‘that guy tweets like a real man’?
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stoked to realize that THINK TWICE: MICHAEL JACKSON is the number one culture podcast on
@ApplePodcasts
. also stoked to have a child in a few days and never care about such things ever again
first five episodes out now, the rest coming over the next month
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remember to always think twice... our new podcast about michael jackson, cohosted by me and
@jsmooth995
, will be out 4/27 from
@audible_com
and
@amazonmusic
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i “hear” linda tripp is trending... so allow me to “say” we interviewed her for many hours and you can “listen” to our account of that on this episode of slow burn:
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salute to the fact-checker who worked on the
@NewYorker
UFO piece and insisted on referring to tom delonge as “a former front man of the pop-punk outfit blink 182.” as opposed to “the”
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why does every biography start w grandparents? get real, biographers... no one cares
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amazing interview. chotiner utterly destroys this guy
New Interview: I talked to Queens nurse Nicholas Choi about his new daily life, treating patients whose families cannot be present, and complicated work dynamics in a medical setting during a pandemic
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still think the best way to do a fiasco-style trump podcast would be to tell the story of each of his pardons. one pardon per episode. someone give me money
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got "owned" last night in a dream. was in a cab, complaining bitterly that the driver went the wrong way. he tried to calm me down + offered to put on music -- "how about alkaline trio?" when i asked how he knew i liked emo he said "bc you're basically crying like a little bitch"
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in my experience, one thing that makes some interviews WAY better than others is that you can tell the person is thinking as they're speaking. feel like this is why everyone enjoys listening to mayor pete talk
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don't know where it'll go from here but am freaking amazed and, dare i say, proud that the
@fivefourpod
patreon broke 1,000 subscribers on its very first day. congrats to
@The_Law_Boy
@AywaRhiannon
and
@_FleerUltra
on making something so many people love
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knew nothing about the civil rights cases before listening to this episode, which also happens to be
@fivefourpod
’s 100th since its launch in february 2020
happy 100th to
@The_Law_Boy
,
@AywaRhiannon
,
@_FleerUltra
, and
@Racheldotbiz
. a singular and now quite huge body of work
This week’s premium episode is the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, which held that racism and slavery are actually unrelated.
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apropos of nothing, a new episode of
@fivefourpod
, a podcast about how much the supreme court sucks, will be out tomorrow
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feel like trump's twitter has gone downhill the same way many once-proud providers of original content did in the early to mid-2010s... mostly just aggregating other people's stuff now, hardly a trace of that old "special sauce" that millions of readers fell in love with...
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if i’m in the same room as her, my wife can tell when i’m about to compose a tweet bc apparently my breathing changes 😳
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slow burn docuseries trailer out now!
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so, a couple of FIASCO announcements.
first up: the BUSH v. GORE season will begin streaming on all platforms tomorrow, 10/14, with all six episodes becoming available *FREE* on
@ApplePodcasts
,
@Spotify
, and elsewhere between now and the election
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