This story update is part of theÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌę°ä±ôČčČőČőŸ±łŠČő, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The Same River Twice,” by David Quammen,Ìęhere.

In the grainy Zoom window, I see Quammen’s walls of shelves, heaving with books, and also a large, empty glass tank.

“I’m in here with Boots the python,” he says, as if it’s totally banal to share office space with a large snake. “That’s his tank.”

Ah, the tank is not empty. That’s cool. And a little terrifying.

“Oh, he’s a sweetheart,” Quammen says. “My wife, Betsy, came downstairs one day about five years ago and said, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but—’ You know how those conversations begin. Betsy says, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but I’ve adopted a python.’ Betsy and I are snake people. I said, ‘What species?’ That’s kind of what passes for our collaborative decision-making.”

Boots is a “very gentle” ball python, Quammen says. “He, like most of our dogs and like the cat, is a rescue.” When Quammen lets Boots crawl around the office, the snake will sometimes slither up and into hidden spaces in the shelves.

“Their favorite habitat is rocky walls. A ball python can go into a niche in a cliff or a mud bank and wedge itself in there like a ball, and it makes it hard for a leopard or a baboon to pull it out and eat it. Boots wedges himself in my bookshelf, and I have to delicately figure out: Which book do I take out next in a way that does not hurt him, bend any of his scales in the wrong direction, to loosen him up a little bit? Eventually, he just sort of falls into my hands.

“He’s only bitten me once, and it was by accident. He was very embarrassed.”

We digress, perhaps. But a conversation with Quammen always contains multitudes: Darwinism, connubial negotiation and bliss, dedication to the literary and the true, and a fierce and gregarious curiosity, with Montana often in the wings. Let’s digress a bit more: had he not bought a used Volkswagen bus in England, and had George McGovern won the U.S. presidency in 1972, it’s very possible Quammen might never have ended up in Montana at all.

He grew up in Cincinnati and got into Yale, where he studied literature and wrote a novel, . He then won a Rhodes Scholarship and headed off to Oxford to earn a graduate degree, writing his thesis on the works of William Faulkner. He obtained the VW bus with money earned from the novel. But in May 1972, Quammen recalls, Richard Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam, and “within about 24 hours I left the Rhodes without permission and came back to the U.S. to work for McGovern’s [anti-war] campaign. After McGovern was squashed in November, I promptly went back to England and found that the head of the Rhodes Scholarships hadn’t written me off.”

Quammen got his Oxford degree and then convinced his friend Dennis to ship the VW to a dockyard in New York. Following an unsatisfying stint in Berkeley, California, Quammen decided to drive the bus “to Montana, filled with Penguin Classics and a portable electric typewriter. And a very cheap fly rod, which I soon ran over and replaced with a better cheap fly rod. I arrived in Missoula on September 12, 1973. A significant day in my life.”

OUTSIDE: I came to work at the magazine the year after you wrote “The Same River Twice.” I don’t know if you remember, I was your fact-checker back in those days. I read this essay, and from that moment on I loved your writing. The bones of the story have everything to do with how you came to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.
QUAMMEN: In 1981, Steve Byers, E. Jean Carroll, and I were all trying to break into magazine writing from Ennis, Montana, the little town we were living in. I was 33; they were a few years older. We heard that the editor of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine was coming to Montana to schmooze with writers, and we thought it’d be great if we could get a shot at meeting that guy and pitch stories to him.

From a phone booth in Bozeman, with a handful of quarters, I cold-called șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in Chicago and asked for John Rasmus, editor in chief. My heart was racing. I was nervous. My mission was to say, “If you come to Ennis, Steve and I will take you fly-fishing on the Madison River.”

This young, casual voice comes on the line: “Hi, this is John.” I say, “Hi, John Rasmus. You don’t know me.” I do my little spiel, and he says, “Oh, OK. Cool.”

Steve and I taught him to cast a fly line in my side yard. Then we took him fishing, and we made sure that he caught some fish. By about sunset on this stretch of the Madison, he was landing a 16-inch rainbow trout.

We took him back to the farmhouse where Steve and Jean lived, and we cooked steaks and drank whiskey. By the end of the evening, we were all best friends. At some point I said: I got a story idea for you. I want to write a piece about what’s good about mosquitoes. John said, “Is anything good?” But in the sober light of day he said, “I’m assigning this to you, right?” I mailed the essay off in a manila envelope and thought, What’s going to happen?

What happened was he accepted it and offered you a job as columnist for a slot already known as Natural Acts.
That was the only time, I think, that I ever actually pitched șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű an idea. After that I’d just send him a piece, usually on time, but at the last minute: “Here’s an essay on sea cucumbers.” “Here’s an essay on giant Pacific octopus.” “Here’s an essay on why crows get bored.” Which is because they’re too intelligent for their station in life.

When I was doing the column, I tended always to look for some kind of synergy between elements that were unexpectedly combined, but when you put them together
 well, son of a gun. I had taken some courses in zoology at the University of Montana when I lived in Missoula. I had taken a course in entomology, another one in aquatic entomology, and another one in ichthyology. I was interested in how spring creeks worked, the fact that they maintain a constant temperature and therefore have a 12-months-of-the-year growing season and can be very productive. This creek behind Steve and Jean’s house was a spring creek.

And then Steve and Jean came to an end. I had so revered their union that, when they split, it gutted me. Then, several years later, I was noodling up a column.

I had that spring creek idea, but it was only half of a column. I needed another half. I needed the yang to that yin. That creek that I fished on with Steve, and the end of their marriage and the end of our special moment, the three of us in that town, became the yang of this piece. I always thought of that time as—there’s a wonderful sentence at the very end of , Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris. He says, “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

One thing I enjoy about the essay is that there are no identifiers—I don’t know where it is except that it’s in Montana. As I reread it recently, I thought about how we are now so information saturated. This piece is almost allegorical—the opposite of online culture.
It’s a very particular, very personal story, but I wanted it to have some sort of universal dimension. I wanted it to have legs. I want to give myself credit for an instinct that not naming the town, not naming the people, not naming the specifics would give it a little bit of permanence. I was describing science with great care and, I hope, precision, but also connecting it with things that were very unscientific—either artistic or simply emotional.

I love that șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű was a place where you could do that, and everybody had the good sense to keep letting you do it.
I did between 152 and 155 columns, something like that. All those wonderful people at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű just letting me do any damn crazy thing, as long as I could make it work and get it in on time. It was a fool’s paradise.

But you started out wanting to write fiction, right?
I wanted to be a novelist. I had taken one science course in college, a biology course, and it was not a good biology course. Didn’t even mention Charles Darwin.

I discovered Faulkner when I was a sophomore at Yale, and I became obsessed with his work. I studied him with a great teacher and a great friend to me, Robert Penn Warren, who knew Faulkner, and who was himself a southerner and a towering American man of letters. When I was a senior, I was rewriting what became my first published novel, To Walk the Line.

But I was a middle-class white male from a happy childhood in Ohio. The world didn’t need that guy to be a novelist. When I got to Montana I started reading nonfiction. Voraciously.ÌęFor the first time.

What prompted you to do that?
I had always been interested in the natural world, but I had been in New Haven and then Oxford—not places where the natural world is very strongly present. I got to Montana, and I got back to the natural world. I was interested in feeling the cold and the snow and feeling the flow of the rivers. But also, I was interested in thinking about it. I was interested in ecology and evolutionary biology. I started reading Darwin. I started reading Heraclitus. I started reading Herodotus. I started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I started reading every which way: Loren Eiseley and J.B.S. Haldane and Mary Kingsley and Annie Dillard and others. And I saw people doing things with nonfiction that were every bit as creative and imaginative as fiction, and much more creative and imaginative than 97 percent of novels.

I want to ask about your books on pandemics, which are both highly literary and diligently reported. You were prescient on this topic, having published , your 2012 book about the rise in zoonotic diseases that transmit dangerously from animals to humans. A decade later came Breathless, in which you argue persuasively for the zoonotic theory of COVID-19 and against the theory that the virus escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.ÌęÌęÌę
One story is the imagined story of a lab leak, and the other is the inferential story of a zoonotic spillover. There is a lot of empirical evidence to support but not finally prove the idea that COVID originated with a zoonotic spillover. There’s a whole historical and scientific context for that. There are pieces of immediate evidence that support that idea.

There’s no empirical evidence to support the lab story. But it is a very, very powerful, enticing story. And that is why it has legs, in my opinion. One of the things that they argue on that side is, “Well, if this came from a zoonotic spillover from a bat, why haven’t we found the original virus in the bat? It’s been four years now. That’s very suspicious.”

Well, no. The problem is they don’t know anything about the history of zoonotic diseases. With the Marburg virus, for example, it took 41 years to find the bat. With Ebola it’s been 48 years, and we still don’t have the answer. It is not mysterious that the last section of evidence in the structure of empirical support for zoonotic spillover of COVID hasn’t been found.

Are you working on a book now?
Yeah. My desk is covered with files, files, files, books, books, and files. I’m working on a book on cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. I’ve been incubating this book for 17 years.

How is cancer evolutionary?
There is a school of thought that I stumbled across in 2006 or 2007 that says to understand cancer, you have to understand it from a Darwinian perspective. Every tumor is a population of cells. As a tumor begins, the cells start mutating more and more. As a tumor grows, it’s a population of cells that vary from one another with genetic variation. And they’re competing. They’re competing for space. They’re competing for blood. They’re competing for oxygen, for other resources that allow them to grow. And when you have a population of variant individuals competing for resources in order to survive and replicate themselves—does that sound familiar? You turn the crank and you have evolution by natural selection.

So why does chemo so often not work? An oncologist prescribes a drug, and I don’t know how much cancer you’ve experienced in your family or your life—

I had breast cancer, and my husband died of lymphoma.
All right. Ouch. Yes. So an oncologist says, “We’re going to treat this with chemo. This is a good drug.” And the chemo knocks down the cancer for six months or so. You get some improvement. And then the cancer becomes resistant to that drug, so you’re forced to use a different drug. Why does it become resistant? For the same reason that a field of grasshoppers becomes resistant to the insecticide DDT. You hit the grasshoppers with DDT one year. You kill off 99 percent of the grasshoppers, and 1 percent of the grasshoppers happen to have genetic resistance to DDT. Two years later, your field is filled with grasshoppers again. This is cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon.

If we live long enough and are lucky enough, we’ll all die of cancer. Lucky enough because it is a result of, among other things, but importantly, the cumulative number of cell divisions that you have. But here’s a question: Why do whales not get cancer?

Whales?
It’s a mystery. It’s called . Whales live a long time, and they have lots and lots of cells. Their cells are not larger than ours, they just have more of them. If you trace a linear curve, whales should be dying of cancer in early middle age, all of them, and they’re not.

Are there any tiny animals that don’t get cancer?
Yes. The naked mole rat, which lives in burrows in the Middle East. It has hardly any fur. It’s blind. It lives underground. A naked mole rat lives to be 20 or 30. A mouse lives to be two. There are cancer biologists who have whole colonies of naked mole rats and have been studying them for 40 years.

This conversation makes me want to be huge. Or very small.
Lisa, just remember: șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in the 1980s, that’s what it was like, when we were very young and very happy.

The post How David Quammen’s Writing Career Was Influenced by his Time Fishing in Montana appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This story update is part of theÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌę°ä±ôČčČőČőŸ±łŠČő, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The King of the Ferret Leggers,” by Donald Katz here.

The author of this tale was Don Katz. Forty-two years later, he’s recounting the legend of this piece to me while sitting inside a majestically repurposed church in Newark, New Jersey, global headquarters of the company he founded: , the world’s leading creator and seller of audiobooks and other original content. Katz recently stepped back from his longtime position as CEO, but he remains active and keeps an office in town. He also remains close to Newark Venture Partners, a social-impact early-stage investment fund, and Audible’s Global Center for Urban Innovation; he established both to focus on solutions to urban inequities, after moving Audible to Newark in 2007.

Hold on a minute: the guy who wrote a piece about ferrets gnawing a man’s privates is the same guy who created Audible? Yes, and a common thread runs through °­ČčłÙłú’s writing career and the business he built: a love of story.

In late 1982, Katz submitted the ferret-king piece to John Rasmus, then °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s editor in chief. This was back in the magazine’s primordial days, when it was still finding its voice. Rasmus loved it. Then the artwork came in—a graphic image by , the famous Rolling Stone artist, showing Reg on the field of battle, clad in baggy pants that appear to be spraying blood.

Rasmus: “I said, ‘Uh-oh.’ ”

Katz had talked Steadman—his good friend and colleague from their days as Rolling Stone contributors in England, where Katz had moved to study at the London School of Economics before getting started as a writer—into illustrating the piece. Delicately, Rasmus nestled the article and its vivid depiction into the issue, running it with a brief subhead (“A True Story”) under the rubric “Revelries of the Rustics.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that this piece became talismanic for the magazine. “It gave us all kinds of good reasons to do stories like ‘Ferret Leggers,’ ” says Rasmus, who in 2017 wrote a tribute to it for °żłÜłÙČőŸ±»ć±đ’s 40th anniversary issue. It also helped establish that an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű story could be literary, visceral, and funny at the same time, often involving a protagonist who must do a particular thing because, to paraphrase George Mallory, it is there to be done.

“Ferret Leggers” is so good that it was stolen many times, even before the internet made that easy to do. People typed it up, put their name on it, and got it published. Katz, who for years worked as an award-winning magazine writer and author, spent more time than he wanted to cease-and-desisting these thieves.

°­ČčłÙłú’s decision to write for a living, and in particular his ability to hear and employ the oral traditions of storytelling in his work, was born in the early 1970s, when he studied at New York University under , the author of the classic novel Invisible Man. The idea of what Ellison called the “musicality” of the spoken word surely was lodged in °­ČčłÙłú’s head while he labored to bring Audible to life. It wasn’t easy. The company would eventually become a huge success, but after the dot-com bust of 1999, Audible traded for as little as four cents a share. It took a decade to make a profit.

°­ČčłÙłú’s two career arcs reminded me of something he wrote about ferrets back in ’83. This creature, he observed, has one very good trait: “a tenacious, single-minded belief in finishing whatever it starts.”

OUTSIDE: As a character, Reg Mellor is hilariously over-the-top, and I think some readers today may wonder if he treated his athletes with the respect and care they deserved.
KATZ: Well, Reg would have said that the real athletes were the tiny cohort of humans who subjected themselves to ferrets being put in this uncaring and potentially cruel situation. My story set out to be a literary satire, pitting legendarily tough Brits from a specific county against equally tough animals, which, as few readers would have known, had been raised and deployed for generations to chase other animals out of holes for the benefit of hunters. There’s no doubt that there were plenty of people around England more than 40 years ago—when there was a movement to outlaw ferrets as pets due to various attacks that happened inside homes—who gave me statements and assertions that became my description of exaggerated ferret fury. But ferret legging was a clearly unacceptable treatment of sentient beings. From my view—as someone who’s aware of emerging science about animals and the father of a vegan animal-rights activist—it’s good that this is no longer a thing, which leaves my literary excursion into irony as a cultural artifact of another time and place.

How did you get the idea to write “The King of the Ferret Leggers”?
When I got to England in the mid-seventies, there was this satirical, couched-in-gossip magazine called Private Eye. I saw a squib in there about someone named Reg Mellor, who had retired in disgust from a competition called ferret legging because he was able to do it for so long that everyone in the stands got bored and left.

I pulled the page out of the magazine and thought: That is so weird. Someday, I’d like to find out what that is.

I bounced the idea off Ralph Steadman, who was already famous in the United States for his Rolling Stone work with Hunter S. Thompson. I kind of put us together as a package. For whatever reason, I got the OK from șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű to do it.

The story was published, and it fairly immediately became a cult thing. People passed it around at cafĂ©s, as if we were living in the days of Victorian poetry. Writers sent it to each other, and it started to have, you know, buzz—and all sorts of unintended consequences for me.

Such as?
Right around that time, I had this idea of trying to write a big story about Nike. The head of Nike, Phil Knight, had never given interviews. I sent him “Ferret Leggers.” He loved it. I got the OK to enter Knight’s world, and that experience grew into my 1994 book, Just Do It: The Nike Spirit in the Corporate World.

I’ve read that “Ferret Leggers” was stolen a bunch of times.
The story comes out, and I go back to writing books and other magazine articles. Then I get a phone call from a friend who was talking to another friend in Germany who was raving about this hysterical article in a major German magazine, about a man in Yorkshire, England, who puts ferrets down his pants.

“You’ve been plagiarized,” he said. I lawyered up and was paid triple damages—which wasn’t that much because of how small my șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű fee was. But at the time I needed the money!

In the late 1990s, when the Unix-based Internet was becoming the World Wide Web, I became aware that the story was available online with other people’s bylines on it. I remember writing to some person at Carnegie Mellon University who was trying to publish it under his name.

I said, “You might not know the concept of intellectual property, but I wrote that. I basically live on that story being republished.” And the kid wrote back, saying, “You old fart, you should be happy that anyone even cares about a story you wrote in 1983.” He attached various manifestos that said information should be free, which was one of the early ideas defining the Internet: to wipe out professional-grade content in favor of the crowd’s content.

Later, when Audible was designing the first download service for content—and inventing the first digital-audio player, which came out almost five years before the iPod—I asked our engineers to create an encryption system that would at least cow the people who wanted to steal others’ work. I said at the time: “If we’re going to sustain the professional creative class through this digital transformation, there have to be some protections. Otherwise, no one’s ever going to get paid.” That was key to Audible’s formation, and a focus on powerfully composed and artfully performed words was fundamental during the 27 years I ran the thing.

For many people the writer-to-tech-CEO trajectory might be confusing at first, but it makes sense that the common link is a love of words.
That’s right. Audible was an idea and a company culture led by a writer. And the truth is, I daydream in prose.

How did you get the elite venture capitalists who backed you to believe in a writer who wanted to create a media category based on technologies that didn’t yet exist?
Well, some of them didn’t believe. But because I’d studied and written about businesses large and small, I knew that getting a business going required capital, and I would need to deploy language and stories that would overcome perceived risk. I discovered, for instance, that 93 million Americans sat in traffic jams driving to and from work—which meant there were hundreds of millions of hours per week that Audible could fill with a premium service offering self-selected entertainment, education, and information. This was a key point in the original business plan. Consumers could “arbitrage” their time, I argued, by programming their own listening time. They could make dead time come alive and get to work smarter than the person in the next cube.

That’s a daunting leap.
The technology-invention risk, on top of the market risk, was real, but I used my journalistic training to be honest about what I didn’t know, and to find expert fellow pioneers and employees to supplement that. The realities of financial and cultural success took much longer to achieve than I expected, but from the beginning I thought—and preached—that digital technology could create an Audible-spawned media category alongside music, books, and other printed material, along with all permutations of film and video. I didn’t go so far as to attribute this to what I learned as an English major mentored by Ralph Ellison, or go on as I did later about why Stephen Crane and Mark Twain wrote like Americans because of their ability to listen to the polyglot sound of Americans talking. But these things were never far from my thoughts.

You also had to invent the technology and the hardware to make it happen. You had to invent the Audible MobilePlayer and a way to download encrypted files. And last but not least, you had to persuade the book publishers to license the rights to books.
Despite the efficiencies of never being out of stock in digital, and the price benefits of no physical packaging, resistance from the publishing establishment was intense. There remained an aristocratic strain within the publishing elite that did not want this change.

This seems like the right time to tell you that, by studying your vast oeuvre—magazine pieces, books, and Audible itself—I’ve identified themes that run through your work. May I try them out on you?
I love that you did that.

My first theory is that you’re drawn to people—you may be one of those people—whom the mainstream considers to be, uh, crazy. People who have outrageous ideas and pursue them. Reg Mellor is such a person.
Definitely true. I also think of them as relentless people who just don’t give up on ideas. In my case, the shift from writing to creating Audible was, even to myself, something of a mystery.

Two more themes: you’re drawn to endurance and domination. Both apply in “Ferret Leggers,” but also in șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű stories like your profile of the father of fitness, Jack LaLanne, which was memorably called “Jack LaLanne Is Still an Animal.”
Jack was such a fascinating, bloody-minded character. He was 80 when I spent time with him, and I think of him often now, as I navigate the realities of aging alongside continued aggressive physical activity.

And, obviously, in the story of Audible, which hung by a thread several times between 1995 and its sale to Amazon in 2008. By 2023, according to one statistic I saw, Audible dominated the U.S. audiobook business, with nearly two-thirds of the market.
There are many ways to define business success, and Audible has clearly achieved a startling level of it by traditional metrics. But what has always mattered to me are the lives that Audible touches in so many ways across listeners, writers, actors, and employees. But there’s no question that if you want to pursue ideas that others may view as unlikely, you better need to win and fear failure in ways most others do not.

Do you have any regrets?
That I was never good enough to be an NHL player. I’m a lifelong hockey player. I would have traded in any of it to be a professional.

The post Behind the Scenes of the Funniest Story șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Ever Published appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

This story update is part of theÌęșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűÌę°ä±ôČčČőČőŸ±łŠČő, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “Cowgirls All the Way,” by E. Jean Carroll here.

• Dealing with media requests from all over the world.
• Writing her column on Substack and cowriting a serial romance novel with —the former president’s niece and a prominent critic of his conduct and politics—while creating an online platform, with her attorney Robbie Kaplan, for women who’ve been sexually assaulted.
• Introducing her new rescue dog, a Great Pyrenees beauty named Miss Havisham, to Guff, her sweet old pit bull.
• Suing Trump for defamation. Again. After he called her a liar and a “” during a CNN town hall held on May 10, a day after the verdict against him.

Carroll was so busy that it felt like our scheduled interview in upstate New York might not actually happen. I was nine minutes away from her remote mountain cabin when my phone rang.

“Have you already left?”

Uh, yes.

Beat.

“OK then! Meet me at the emergency room!”

Eight minutes later, I greeted her in the ER parking lot. She looked chic in a belted white cargo jumpsuit and black combat boots. On her cheek were a laceration and a purpling bruise.

“I broke up a dogfight,” she said, sounding pretty chipper about it. Guff and Miss Havisham had vigorously disagreed; E. Jean attempted to mediate. One more adventure in a life overflowing with them.

Full disclosure: I’ve known E. Jean Carroll for 35 years, starting when I worked at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in the late 1980s and early ’90s and she wrote for us. Later, from 2013 to 2019, I edited the Ask E. Jean advice column for Elle. I’ve been friends with her long enough to know that she reveres Jane Austen and Joan Didion and is a vegetarian who’d dreamed of being a writer since she was six. But in all that time, she never uttered a word to me about what happened to her in a Bergdorf-Goodman dressing room nearly 30 years ago.

It was only when New York magazine published an from her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, that I learned what she’d been carrying all those years—not just the horrible encounter with Trump, but bad incidents with other men, too. She lived with these traumas even as she hiked the mountains of Papua New Guinea as a writer for Playboy in search of what the magazine unfortunately called “primitive man” and conducted action-packed interviews with Hunter S. Thompson for her 1993 book .

You want gonzo? “I stayed with Hunter two weeks the first time,” she recalls, “and the second time about eight or nine days—before we got into a fistfight and I ran to the phone and dialed a taxi. When the nice lady dispatcher picked up, I screamed, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ And she said, ‘Are you at Hunter’s?’”

I know what Trump’s defamations cost E. Jean, because for 27 years she was a marquee columnist at Elle, providing counsel to women with problems that were sometimes frivolous but more often very serious. And when she spoke out about the primitive man who had sexually assaulted her in Bergdorf’s, she lost her job.

A definition of a resilient person is one who is able to hold contrasting ideas and experiences in her head and continue to live a meaningful life. E. Jean embodies this concept, which is good, as her dispute with Trump is far from over. In late June he countersued, saying that Carroll had acted with malice when, after a jury settled on a lesser charge of sexual assault, she publicly said that he’d raped her. Meanwhile, Carroll has another underway—it involves derogatory statements Trump made while in the White House—that appears to be heading toward a trial.

After all the ER drama was done—two hours, one tetanus shot, and one bottle of antibiotics—we finally went to her home, which is surrounded by a small forest of turquoise-painted trees. “The water-based paint helps them stay strong and grow fat and ward off bugs and look pretty at the same time,” she explained. The house is also fronted by a chartreuse sign in the driveway that warns: BEWARE THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES / SHE IS BIG AND CRAZY.

Inside, books are the central design motif. They overflow the shelves and are stacked in piles on the furniture and the floor. She used to keep some in the oven, until she got rid of the oven. We made a salad with crusty bread and discussed hard work, humor, adventure, and the ways men see, or don’t see, women—all ideas that permeate her 1981 șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű story, an elegant, hilarious, and seething-just-beneath-the-surface report on a competition and pageant called Miss Rodeo America. The interview features a helpful phone cameo from John Rasmus, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű’s head honcho during those years and her editor for the story.

OUTSIDE: This piece was published in 1981—that was 42 years ago. Yet it feels like it was written last week.
CARROLL: Jesus. Well, the culture hasn’t changed. It was my first story for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. Ten days in Oklahoma City for the Miss Rodeo USA Championships! Nobody in magazines would send you anywhere for ten days now.

RASMUS: In the summer of 1980, I was out in Grand Teton National Park on vacation. Steve Byers—then E. Jean’s husband, and later the editor in chief of Outdoor Life—reached out to me from Montana. He said, “Come to Ennis. My wife is a writer, and this guy David Quammen lives nearby.”

CARROLL: Quammy!

For those who don’t already know: Quammen, a columnist and feature writer for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű in the eighties and nineties, did more than anyone in the magazine’s history to define how it covered natural science. He’s the author of many books, including Spillover and, which examine the conditions that led to the COVID-19 pandemic and the development of the vaccines.
RASMUS: I drove up there, and Byers, Quammen, and I had just enjoyed this fantastic day fly-fishing on a creek near the Madison River. We came back for dinner, and E. Jean was described to me as extremely focused on her work: “We may not see her. She writes all day out back in the shed with the spiders.”

CARROLL: Fourteen black widow spiders.

You were 37 when “Cowgirls” was published. What kind of jobs did you have before then?
CARROLL: I was a lifeguard. I was a teacher. I was in Chicago during the riots after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. I taught gym there. I taught gym at the girls’ reformatory school in Saint Anthony, Idaho. From the time I was 12, those were the jobs I would take as I filled the mail with pitches to magazines. Nobody hired me, ever.

RASMUS: She proposed “Cowgirls” to us at a point when we were really trying to do more writing-for-good-writing’s sake—going for the humor, energy, and quirkiness that became central to the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű brand. She was already very much part of the Montana writing scene in the seventies and eighties, a whole world of people with high ambition and deep literary backgrounds, countercultural and postmodern personas. E. Jean had confidence and star power, and her piece had a stream of consciousness to it. She didn’t explain too much, she just pulled you along for the ride.

Who were your heroes? Who was in your head while you were writing “Cowgirls”
CARROLL: Didion. There’s a lot of Joan Didion in that piece.

There’s a great line in the story where you say to Miss Rodeo Utah, “You look like you’ve won a lot of beauty contests. Have you ever entered one?” When you were in college in the early 1960s, you were a beauty queen yourself, and a cheerleader. What was that like?
CARROLL: At the University of Indiana, I was in a sorority, Pi Phi. They would put us up for these contests as a duty to the sorority—for instance, they told five of us to compete for Miss Indiana University. And all five of us ran up and down the runway. And because I have a large personality, and I love being on stage, and I didn’t mind strutting around in high heels in a bathing suit, and I did a comedy routine for my talent portion, and I thought it was all ridiculous, I won Miss Indiana University. My mother was happy because it got me a paid semester of tuition.

As for Miss Cheerleader USA, the athletic department put me up for it. I found myself in the finals and won the thing. It was fun—you can see in the pictures that I was enjoying myself. There were really beautiful girls in those contests, much prettier than me. But you’ve got to have that sort of oomph. I had the oomph.

RASMUS: You can just imagine what she was like on the phone when we were talking about the rodeo idea. “Rasmus! I’ve been a cheerleader, I know what this competitive life looks like. These cowgirls are great, they’re strong, they’re beautiful!” She talked William Allard, a famous National Geographic photographer, into doing the shoot for a reduced rate. How could we not do it?

CARROLL: They were real athletes, a real help to their parents on their ranches. They could turn those horses on a dime, because they needed to turn those horses on a dime. If a calf runs off when you’re moving the herd to high grass, you have to know how to handle a horse. They knew how—they were put on horses when they were two and three. Miss Utah took her first naps on her horse.

The story works on two levels. On one hand, it’s a very straight and fun telling of what you saw—the direction the arrows on their form-fitting jackets are pointed, how they handle a horse. But I sense an undercurrent of rage at the way these kinds of competitions diminish the cowgirls’ totality as serious women and athletes—which is what a woman on a horse is.
CARROLL: There was anger in there. I left a lot of stuff out. Three instances in particular made my blood boil. They had a lot of cocktail hours, events that the rodeo queens had to go to with the big boosters from Oklahoma and Texas—guys who were there to meet the queens. I was talking to somebody from Oklahoma, and he said, “Oh, Miss Oklahoma is such an airhead. Don’t even bother talking to her.” That’s how he talked about his own queen. But she was so smart. She was tall, really lean, I think she was at Oklahoma State and may have been going to vet school. Obviously, she had brushed him off.

They also told the queens they had to “loosen up.” And when they were getting ready to go to an event with all the big chicken pluckers from Alabama and such places, they had them parade around these guys in a circle, march around and act like they were having fun, and at the end they were told to yell, “Bullshit!” They made the queens say “bullshit” to get them to loosen up.

What’s the third thing that made your blood boil?
CARROLL: A man who was connected to the officials at the competition, and who was always just around, came up to me on the first or second day I was there, looked me up and down, and said, simply: “No strings.”

Yuck. Do you think your life outside—the years in Montana and the trek in Papua New Guinea, the river expeditions and road trips—was a response in any way to the things that happened to you at the hands of men? Put another way: Did your life outside make you feel less vulnerable to those kinds of men?
CARROLL: Miss Lizzie, long ago, deep in the sticks of Indiana, my ma opened the door, and I ran outside the moment I could walk. I am still outside. Now I am the old crone on the mountaintop. And people are frightened of me.

Lisa Chase started her career as an editor at șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, then moved to New York and worked for Premiere, The New York Observer, New York, and Elle. She followed her dreams and opened a restaurant in 2020, then followed her gut and closed it in 2023.

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I'll begin withÌęthe story of YS Falls, a set of cascading drops and cool, clear pools set in a Jamaican rainforest. It’s in Saint Elizabeth parish, where for a few years now I’ve been taking my son on vacation. Saint Elizabeth is a beautiful part of the country, far off the beaten path; to reach it from Montego Bay or Kingston takes four or five hours on bad roads. There are few walled resorts here, no package tours of sunburned Americans and Europeans getting drunk at 10 A.M. The people are nice but not too nice; large stretches of the coasts remain undeveloped. I like it because it has yet to be ruined by people like me.Ìę

According to locals (), YS is one of the wonders of Saint Elizabeth. Last April, on what happened to be my son’s 15th birthday, I hired a taxi to take us there. Davey did not want to go; he wanted to “chill” and “sleep in.” But I wanted to “experience this natural wonder.” So my angry kid and I arrive at YS, which upon first impression is paradisiacal. We walk into the main building, where we must pay a fee (OK, fine), and we are assigned a guide. There is no other way to see YS; we can’t wander around on our own. The guide asks for Davey’s iPhone. I think he’s holding it to keep it safe and dry. But no. For the next hour, he herds us through the falls on a trip that is organized entirely around photo ops. We’re trapped in a conga line of tourists, each group with its own guide who’s holding their smartphones, taking Instagram-worthy shots. We are told to pose in front of one set of falls and—tap!—the guide gets the shot. We’re told to frolic in a pool and—tap!—we’re captured sheepishly frolicking. We are in a kind of hell.

We climb to the top of the tallest falls, where they’ve built a deck jutting out over a pool 25 feet below. The guide instructs Davey to jump; the point of this, of course, is the shot that will be produced of him flying in midair.

“I’m not gonna jump,” Davey says.

“Oh yes you are,” the guide says.

Davey narrows his eyes. “No, I’m not.”

Quickly, before I can object, the guide shoves him off the ledge and—tap!—gets the picture of my son arcing out over the falls. I run onto the deck to look for him below. Thank God, he’s swimming to the edge of the pool. The guide shows me the picture. I must admit, it’s an epic shot.

Davey won’t speak to me after that. Happy birthday! But when we’re back at our villa, I notice that he has posted the picture to his Instagram feed. He’s already up to 83 likes.

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“Today IÌęwas replacing swear words. I had to do it myself. No one else can do it,”Ìędocumentary filmmaker Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi says over a nouvelle Indian lunch at bohemian-cool Pondicheri in Manhattan. She appears every bit the sophisticated New Yorker: elegant and slender, with an expensive-looking black leather jacket slung over her shoulder. It’s 98 degrees in the shade outside, yet she orders a spicy aviyal (a robust coconut vegetable stew) and a bowl of hot turmeric soup. And she enthusiastically accepts my offer to share my paneer dish and naan. She may look delicate, but I suspect she knows something about voraciousness.

Vasarhelyi and her husband, climber and filmmaker Jimmy Chin, codirected 2015’s narratively rich and visually jaw-dropping Meru, which chronicles the first ascent of the Shark’s Fin, a treacherous spire atop 20,702-foot Mount Meru in the Indian Himalayas. But the f-bombs to be replaced today occur in a not-quite-final cut of her latest collaboration with Chin, Free Solo. The film, , is about climber Alex Honnold’s pioneering 2017 ropes-free ascent of Yosemite’s El Capitan, a feat he accomplished in three hours and 56 minutes.

In the cut I saw in June, Honnold clocks four fucks in the first eight minutes. But —not especially fuck friendly. So before Vasarhelyi can fly out of New York City (where she primarily works and lives, along with the couple’s young son and daughter) to join Chin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (where he primarily works and lives), she needs to scrub the cursing. “These guys,” she says, meaning climbers, “all swear.”

“It helped that she didn’t give a fuck about climbing,” says Jon Krakauer, a big fan of Vasarhelyi and the key talking head in Meru. That film is studded with moments of Krakauer explaining the culture of climbing and the danger involved in attempting such a peak, as well as the motivation for doing so—all facets Vasarhelyi strongly advocated for, to help make the film’s core alpinism accessible to a wider audience.

Still, her marriage to and collaboration with Chin has struck some in climbing as a collision of worlds, and their living arrangement is just one of the outcomes that raises eyebrows. “Everyone is like, ‘How do they do it with Chai in New York and Jimmy in Jackson?’ ” says Conrad Anker, one of the protagonists of Meru, along with Chin and Renan Ozturk. Then he adds, exasperated with the prying, “I don’t know how they do it, but they do it! They make it work.” (Vasarhelyi, too, is fed up with the topic. “Why does Jimmy say he lives in Jackson Hole? Because he doesn’t like New York and he often says he lives ‘just in Wyoming.’ Let him live ‘just in Wyoming.’ He’s in New York a lot.”)

During the three years between Anker, Chin, and Ozturk’s ill-fated attempt on the in 2008 and their successful redo in 2011, Ozturk was nearly killed in a terrible skiing accident and Chin miraculously survived a major avalanche. That’s all included in Meru, as are interviews with the climbers’ wives, girlfriends, and sisters—elements that existed in early iterations of the film but were reshot to bring up the emotional quotient when Vasarhelyi got involved. She helped break the mold of the typically bro-heavy genre of climber cinema and extreme-sports flicks in general. (See: the entire oeuvre of Warren Miller.) Meru delves into the fear and support that coexist in the families of these men. This, too, is largely thanks to Vasarhelyi’s influence. “It’s because I have skin in the game,” she says. In other words, because she’s in love with a guy who climbs peaks that might kill him, she needed to try to explain to herself the why of it.

“At Sundance for Meru, it was a completely different world for me,” says Anker. “I went from doing videos for Ernie’s Telemark Shop to being in a film that was a . On my end, it makes things easier—now we don’t have to do a film about my life. Chai and Jimmy did it already, we’re good.” It’s true: Anker shows up emotionally in Meru (“It was an eight-hour interview,” Vasarhelyi marvels), talking about his friendship with his climbing partner Alex Lowe, who died in a 1999 Himalayan avalanche, and how he fell in love with and married Lowe’s wife, Jenny, and adopted their three sons.

Honnold was in the market for a similarly definitive film when he began to contemplate free-soloing El Capitan. Nothing he was going to do as a climber would surmount that; El Cap is his godhead. “Chai brought a totally different approach to filmmaking than I’d experienced before,” he says on the phone from his home in Las Vegas. “Most of the time, in my other climbing films, you’re shooting for a brand—you go out and get the shot. You do it 17 times. Working with Chai was the first time I worked with someone who cared about getting the honest moment.”

By the time Honnold had begun to think seriously about El Capitan, he’d met Vasarhelyi only once. “It was at a North Face athletes summit,” he says. “A Giants game was on TV. An unnamed member of the team had edibles. I’d heard about this really smart woman from New York who was with Jimmy, this filmmaker—you know, Upper East Side, it’s pretty classy. And the first thing I said to her was, ‘Good to meet you. I’m completely incapacitated.’ I spent the whole Giants game with her.” After what Honnold describes as six months of courtship, he chose Chin and Vasarhelyi to film his climb. He knew they’d care for the story and be able to document the attempt in a way that wouldn’t compromise his safety.

“In a strange way, Chai and Alex are alike,” Chin says, calling from a surf vacation somewhere on the Pacific coast of Mexico, atop a bluff he climbed to get cell reception. “Her films are meticulously assembled. She doesn’t turn back until she’s tried everything. There’s a certain mentality of a climber in there—she won’t give up.

“It’s also about accuracy,” Chin continues. “It’s vĂ©ritĂ©. She has a certain level of restraint. You’re always tempted in filmmaking to play up or overstate something. Chai is intense and understated. She’s not tempted. She’s just like, nope.”

“I always wonder about the word intense,” Vasarhelyi says in a tone that indicates she doesn’t wonder at all. “Intense is used to describe women. Guys are intense, but they don’t get described that way.”

OK, but: she’s pretty intense. She’s only 39, and for her entire life she’s been living a high-octane, continent-spanning life in a family of intellectuals. The Vasarhelyis are old-school Upper East Siders, the kind of cultured meritocrats who defined that part of Manhattan before the hedge-fund managers took over. Chai’s parents, Marina and Miklos, were immigrants from Hong Kong and Hungary, respectively, who came to the States in the seventies to study and teach after meeting in California. (“I think the story was, he was the professor and she was his TA,” Vasarhelyi says.)

Growing up in Manhattan, she attended , which describes itself as a place for “girls of adventurous intellect.” She was good at science, a Westinghouse scholar. Her family’s apartment was steps from the Whitney Museum, and she says she spent many afternoons hanging out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where her mother worked before she became the CFO of the New School. (She also worked at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Columbia University.)

When Vasarhelyi was 12, she cohosted a TV show on Nickelodeon called Totally Kids Sports. “You will never be able to find . And that’s good,” she says emphatically. “It was Connie Chung’s heyday, right? They were looking for a nice Asian girl.”

Her dad, now a professor of business at Rutgers University, taught Vasarhelyi and her younger brother to ski—took them to Jackson Hole, in fact. He apparently taught them well. “Chai can drop Corbet’s Couloir,” says Chin, full of admiration. “She can show up in Jackson and rip the tram.”

Vasarhelyi started her film career while a student at Princeton, working in Hong Kong for the late ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. Her first documentary, , which was completed in 2003 when she was 24, followed seven college-age friends in Kosovo aching not just to live but to thrive in spite of the Bosnian conflict. “The only thing that separated us was circumstance, right?” says Vasarhelyi. “I had all these privileges. They never had those opportunities in a war that was supposed to be over.” A Normal Life won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003 and caught the attention of the late Hollywood director Mike Nichols, who hired Vasarhelyi as his assistant on Closer.

She spent much of the next decade working on films about Senegal. If you’re in Vasarhelyi’s personal orbit, you kind of have to love Senegal: “My brother has been three times, my parents have been three times,” she says. “I lived there for five years. Jimmy’s been to Senegal. Our daughter, Marina, went when she was a baby. We had a mosquito net around her Baby Bjorn.” Vasarhelyi’s documentary , about the great Senegalese musician, premiered at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals in 2008. Next came Touba, a “visual poem” of a film, in the words of one critic, that follows the annual pilgrimage of more than a million Senegalese Sufi Muslims to that city. In 2012, Vasarhelyi met Chin at a Summit Series conference (think Aspen Ideas Festival meets Coachella), where he was giving a talk on Meru and failure.

Long story short, part one: “We were standing alone right outside of where I was giving my talk, and I started chatting,” Chin says. “I said, ‘Oh, you’re a filmmaker. I’m about to give a talk. Want to come?’ And she blew me off and said, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ Which is totally Chai.”

But Vasarhelyi did put Chin in touch with a friend from childhood, Harvard professor and author Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, who was writing a book about creativity and failure and happened to be attending the conference, too. A connection among the trio was forged—“although,” Lewis says, “I immediately felt like the third wheel.”

Long story short, part two: “I was like, ‘Hey, do you mind taking a look at my assembly?’ ” Chin says, referring to his footage for Meru. At that point, the film had been knocking around for a couple of years, failing to get into Sundance and other festivals. “I sent it to Chai, and I didn’t hear from her for three months. I thought: (A) she doesn’t like me, and (B) she doesn’t like my film.”

Neither was true. Vasarhelyi was in Senegal during those three months, filming , a visceral look at violent clashes between students and the government of Abdoulaye Wade in 2012. When she returned to New York, she and Chin reconnected, began working on Meru, and fell in love. At the time, the project had a scant 35 hours of footage, including the climb and the interviews. It was Vasarhelyi’s idea to rewrite and reshoot, to “see whether Conrad, Renan, and Jimmy could access the emotions that were real.”

Krakauer calls the earlier version “a fine climbing film, just more kinda climbing porn. Chai turned it into a really good film, not just a good climbing film. It’s probably the best of the genre. Jimmy would agree with this.”

“That’s what she has, the sensibility of narrative and seeing ahead,” says Chin. “Sometimes she can see the film before it’s made. Also, understanding how the industry works. I have that capacity with expeditions. I don’t have that in the filmmaking world.”

Meru won the audience award for documentary at Sundance and received much critical acclaim. It also earned more than $2.4 million at the box office, making it one of the top-earning docs of 2015. Vasarhelyi talked Krakauer into being part of the publicity campaign; she was hoping for an Oscar nomination and playing the schmoozing game. She made the rounds with Krakauer, Chin, and Anker. But Meru didn’t land on the list for best documentary film. It was probably one of the few times in Vasarhelyi’s life that she came up short.

Meru at its core is about friendship, about its bonds and boundaries, and it’s clear that friendships were altered and came to an end through Chin’s collaboration with Vasarhelyi. At the time, Chin was still with , the production company he founded with Ozturk and photographer Tim Kempel. The three later recruited director Anson Fogel as a partner. Shortly after Vasarhelyi and Chin connected, Camp4 broke up for reasons that are still unclear but that seem to involve creative friction between Chin and the other partners and Chin’s desire to keep working on Meru.

The climber-filmmaker world is an insular place, with its own customs and ways. Vasarhelyi was considered an interloper. When I ask her about the whisper campaign that surrounded Meru—that she’s autocratic, that she was responsible for Chin’s Camp4 departure, she replies, “Hmmm. They say that? I really don’t have anything to say about it.” In 2015, Chin told National Geographic, “I’d prefer not to go into it, but I am happy to say that I founded Camp4 with Tim Kemple and Renan Ozturk in 2010. We brought in Anson Fogel a couple years later, and I left the company in 2013.” Fogel declined to comment.

Whatever resentments may remain in the climbing world, if Meru and Free Solo are any indication, her partnership with Chin will continue to produce great films. “We’re in a rhythm. We both know what the other person brings to the table,” Chin says. They each mention the connections they felt upon meeting: commitments to authenticity and storytelling and pushing the envelope, their shared Chinese heritage, even Jackson Hole. And professionally, they complement each other. Together their talents produce gorgeously shot films with an emotional core. As Chin says, “Worlds colliding works.”

Nowhere is that more evident than in Free Solo. Maybe the greatest paradox of the film is that it required a monumental operation that remained invisible. Five cameramen had to be ready to be in position on the wall on just a few hours’ notice, and there was a crew of three more on the ground. There was a helicopter for big sweeping shots of the wall and aerial shots of Honnold, a speck in a red T-shirt, shimmying up the white granite. He needed to be able to decide the time of the climb based on his intuition and readiness, not on some production schedule. He needed to feel free to bail. He wanted to be filmed, but he didn’t want to feel filmed.

“Alex told Jimmy at about five the evening before that he was probably going to go the next morning,” Vasarhelyi says. “Jimmy’s team was in position, but Alex had no idea they were in position.”

How was that even possible? How did they accomplish that? “By disappearing,” she says. “By making Alex feel that it was all good, whether he went or not.” It’s Vasarhelyi’s turn to be full of admiration for what her husband achieved. “They really played down the investment, the operation that was there. There were a lot of cameras—nine.” Some of them were mounted remotely near the most harrowing parts of the route. The crew couldn’t bear the thought of possibly filming Honnold falling to his death. Honnold couldn’t bear laying that responsibility on them. The stakes were high in every way. These people were intimately involved with one another.

“It’s why this film has captured the elegance of climbing. And of my process,” Honnold says. “I mean, they could have made some crazy, adrenaline-fueled, ‘He’s going to his death
.’ ”

Nope. Vasarhelyi may not be a climber, but she cares deeply about the sport and had no interest in portraying Honnold as a risk junkie with a death wish—the way he’s sometimes treated by the mainstream media. The idea at the core of Free Solo, she says, “is this kid who is so scared of talking to other people that it was easier for him to climb alone, with no ropes, than to ask for a partner. I feel like we all have something in our lives like that. It was really important to see Alex’s eyes before he did it. What did his eyes look like the morning he set off?”

And what did the camera see? Vasarhelyi’s eyes light up. “He was excited.” Long pause. “And very well prepared.”

Lisa Chase () is a writer and former editor for ELLE, New York magazine, and Wired. She is currently at work on a book about raising a boy on her own.

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