Episode 25: Maria Bustillos

The Sunday Long Read Podcast

Maria Bustillos is the current editor in chief of Popula, an alternative news and culture magazine that recently launched on the blockchain-based Civil platform. In this week's episode, Don and Maria walk through one of Popula's first pieces published, her 20,000-word interview with the late Anthony Bourdain — “he spent two and a half hours with me in the comfy Irish bar, blabbing about everything under the sun ... And nobody bothered us in all that time, it was like there was a force field around him.” — as well as blockchain-based journalism — “it’s obvious why [blockchain] recordkeeping is valuable for journalism: it allows us to maintain archives that can’t be censored or altered after the fact. We can amend previous records only through addenda, in other words: not through erasure. This is the first benefit of blockchain technology to the free press, and this benefit alone makes it worth moving our news media into blockchain-based publishing systems.” Maria's work has previously appeared in The New Yorker, The Awl, The New York Times, Harper’s and The Guardian. This week’s episode includes explicit language.

• [1:05] Bourdain Confidential (Popula)
• [8:12] Fiction Confidential (Eater)
• [21:24] ZigZag Podcast
• [26:22] Why does journalism need blockchain technology? (Civil)
• [26:22] Civil is the decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism (Civil)
• [35:11] The Smallness of Mark Zuckerberg (Medium)
• [36:50] RIP Jonathan Gold (Popula)
• [37:25] STAT: My Daughter’s MS Diagnosis and the Question My Doctors Couldn’t Answer (Longform)