How Long Gone · Chris Black & Jason Stewart / Talkhouse

914. - Tom Junod

March 6, 2026·1 hr 14 min·7 clips

Tom Junod describes how his boss flooded a small store with handbags, leaving the owner in tears and desperate for help.

Paris does not cooperate. Chris and Jason start in the drag of a hotel lobby after travel, early-check-in rejection, and fresh Cali-to-Paris confusion. Chris is sore from the trip. The leg pain turns into a runway joke almost immediately, because this show can make discomfort feel like styling. The banter stays loose. Their Loewe setup gives the cold open some shine before the Tom Junod conversation slips into darker territory. Junod has range. He talks about still being able to do serious work while the media world around him has changed. One example hits hard: his 2022 ESPN story, a 32,000-word piece about a Penn State player from his hometown. The subject is bleak. Junod describes a horrific serial rapist and says the story involved protection tied to Joe Paterno. The hosts stay with it. Jason sees sports as one of the few places where massive reported pieces can still find loyal readers. He is not a sports guy, which makes the point land better. He would still watch the documentaries and read the long piece. Netflix enters from the side. An Untold project and a coming Lamar Odom documentary become proof that a story can outrun team loyalty. Junod is less sure. He says nobody saw the end coming for media, especially when the early internet looked like pure distribution upside. Then the question gets current. Would a story that spread widely in 2022 move the same way in 2026, when everything feels faster? TikTok becomes the punchline. Maybe only the worst parts, sliced down and pushed through the machine, would travel now. They end by loosening the room again. A riff on a Smiths-style version of Led Zeppelin's Good Times, Bad Times and texting Morrissey lets the episode drift back into absurdity.

As heard by us

Tom Junod joins How Long Gone for a loose Paris conversation about reporting, sports, and whether longform stories can still break through.

How Long Gone catches Tom Junod in a loose, rangy conversation about what survives as media habits keep shifting. Chris Black and Jason Stewart open from Paris in their familiar travel-static mode, killing time after a flight, nursing hotel-lobby impatience, minor body…

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Why you'd press play

For when Paris, ESPN, and a Morrissey detour end up in the same room.

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