Origin Stories

Julie Cohn is a journalist, screenwriter, and Tony Award–winning theater producer whose work spans film, stage, and audio. Her reporting has appeared in outlets like The New York Times and The Daily, and on Broadway she and her sister Marion co-founded The Cohn Sisters, a Tony-winning production company behind shows including Stereophonic, Suffs, Cabaret, John Proctor Is the Villain, and Just For Us. Her latest project is The Redefector, a ten-part investigative podcast about the strange Cold War case of KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko, who defected to the United States in 1985 before unexpectedly returning to the Soviet Union. In this episode, she talks with Matthew about how she first stumbled onto the story while researching another spy project, the unusual challenges of reporting inside the secretive world of intelligence, and why trust becomes the central currency when you're trying to report on spies. “If your source trusts you, they’ll recommend you to another source who trusts you. It’s like a very slow-motion domino. Your flashlight gets a little bit wider every time you meet someone new in the story.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Delaney Hall is a veteran producer and editor who got her start in audio journalism at Chicago Public Radio’s Third Coast International Audio Festival. She later worked on State of the Re:Union, the NPR documentary show hosted by Al Letson, and helped launch the investigative journalism program Reveal, where she was part of a team that won an Emmy Award for New Approaches in News. Today she is a senior producer at 99% Invisible and the host of Service Request, a new podcast collaboration between 99% Invisible and Campside Media. In this episode, she talks to Matthew about the origins of Service Request and the challenge of turning complex infrastructure, things like electricity, city services, and the systems that power everyday life, into narrative stories. Hall explains how the show looks for the human perspective inside systems most of us rarely think about, often by talking to the people who build and maintain them. “If you look closely enough at anything in the world made by human hands,” she says, “there’s a really interesting drama behind how it came to be.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Adam Rapp is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose work spans theater, film, and fiction. His plays include The Sound Inside and Red Light Winter, and his novels include The Year of Endless Sorrows. He also wrote and directed the film Winter Passing, starring Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell. In recent years, Rapp took on a very different kind of challenge: adapting S.E. Hinton’s classic novel The Outsiders into a Broadway musical, which opened in 2023 and went on to win multiple Tony Awards. In this episode, he talks to Matthew about the decade-long process of turning a beloved coming-of-age novel into a stage production. Rapp describes how the show evolved through years of drafts, workshops, and creative experimentation, and how the team worked to balance the story’s emotional extremes while honoring the spirit of Hinton’s original book. “It was important for [The Outsiders] to be as brutal as it was tender, as funny as it was grim,” he says. “Tragedy and beauty — they both have to speak equally.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shaun Raviv is an Atlanta-based journalist and a fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. In 2024, he reported and hosted “Noble,” which was named the best podcast of the year by the New Yorker. But in this episode of Origin Stories, he talks to Matthew about the story that got him started in longform nonfiction: “The Killers of Swaziland,” which explores a tragic string of murders in the African country. “Even though I had very little experience,” Shaun says of his early efforts, “I still felt in my gut, I could take this really amazing story and put it on paper in a way that people would appreciate.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Dr. Sohaira Siddiqui and Salman Ahad Khan are behind More Muslim, a narrative podcast that explores the diversity of Muslim life through personal stories, history, and culture. The project grew out of a relationship that began more than a decade ago, when Khan took an Islamic law class with Siddiqui at Georgetown’s Doha campus and found himself having the kind of complex conversations about religion, ethics, and identity he’d been waiting his whole life to have. Years later, he returned to the idea of turning those conversations into a podcast, launching More Muslim with support from the Al-Mujadilah Center and Mosque for Women, where Siddiqui now serves as executive director and host of the show. In this episode, they talk to Matthew about building the podcast and the challenge of telling stories about Muslim life without flattening them into familiar narratives. They discuss the balance between universal themes and cultural specificity, and why each episode aims to capture a different slice of experience. “There are universal experiences that bind us together and connect us — that’s what makes storytelling across generations and people and religions compelling,” Siddiqui says. “But there are also moments of difference, and those are important to touch upon.” Khan adds: “There’s some part of my brain that’s been hardwired to be like, maybe I need to explain this thing to you.” To connect with the team and gain access to behind the scenes content, join our community at ⁠joincampside.com⁠. You can also find us on ⁠Instagram⁠, ⁠TikTok⁠ & ⁠Youtube⁠. Have a question, guest recommendation or just want to say hi? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.