"A predilection for abyss-gazing”: Why Talia Lavin is drawn to writing about the far right

The journalist and Wild Faith author on covering extremism and, surprisingly, sandwiches

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Oct 22, 2024

For her first book, 2020’s Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy, Talia Lavin went undercover in neo-Nazi online communities for nearly a year. It’s an experience Lavin, who is Jewish and descended from Holocaust survivors, once likened to “bathing in acid every day.”

“I was constantly bombarded with really vicious, murderous propaganda,” Lavin tells Depth Perception. “Often people literally wanted to kill me, specifically. Not to mention anyone who looks like me or comes from my background.” So for her new book, Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, she abandoned the “gonzo angle,” opting for a more traditional approach, which included more than 100 interviews with former Evangelicals.

Lavin says “a predilection for abyss-gazing” is what draws her to covering the right wing. To help maintain her sanity “and balance out some of the darker material,” she’s been going through Wikipedia’s list of sandwiches in alphabetical order and writing about them on her Substack, The Sword and the Sandwich. “I’m pretty proud of my sandwich series,” she says. “I think they’re interesting and surprising and fun, and as often a look into forces like history and immigration — and personal narrative — as they are a look at just, like, a sandwich.”

Lavin, who is based in New York, recently spoke with Depth Perception via phone. The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

Why did you become a journalist?

I wanted to be a novelist and an academic. I didn’t take any journalism classes. I didn’t go to J-School. But my first job out of college, I was an intern at a Jewish newswire, and I very quickly became addicted to people reading my work. I loved having an audience, and I realized that was something that with academic writing was just not ever going to happen. I kind of got addicted to having a relationship with readers, to feeling like I was informing, reaching people, telling people’s stories, and I never turned back.

What longform nonfiction writer do you envy the most?

I guess I should have a juicy answer to this, but anyone making a lot of money, because I’m not. I really admire Ariel Levy at the New Yorker. I think she’s a wonderful writer, and I certainly wish I had a career trajectory like hers. But I wouldn’t call it envy so much as like, “Damn, I wish I had an iota of security.”

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What is a story/book/movie/podcast that you would wish you had created or written?

I wish I’d been involved with The Wicker Man from 1973. It’s the greatest movie in history. You’ve got Christopher Lee at the height of his powers. It’s a horror musical. It’s about how sinister folk music is. And, you know, it’s got one of the best endings of all time.

If you could write an all-access profile of anyone in the world, who would it be?

I’m not really in the business of writing all-access profiles. That’s not my métier. But it would be very interesting to confront someone like James Dobson [the evangelical Christian founder of Focus on the Family] with his legacy of pain, and certainly if I were able to have unfettered access to him, that would be fascinating.

Do you have a favorite internet rabbit hole that is not part of your beat?

World War I. Just every aspect of it. The history, the literature, the ways it changed the world. I’m working on a novel that is set in that period. I’m obsessed with it. It expresses the most raw and violent and intense aspects of personal human experience, while at the same time being an expression of detachment and folly and collapse. And we’re talking about the ruination of thousand-year empires. These seismic changes that affect our world to the very moment.

I certainly felt that I hadn’t learned enough about it in history class, and have really come to it as an adult. I’m like, “I need to know everything. Everything.” So I have a little World War I library of like 30 books that I’m working through.

“My mom said, ‘Don’t go into journalism.’ My hubris was unbounded, and like a Greek hero, I’ve been punished for it.”
— Talia Lavin

What’s your worst writing habit?

I have a tendency of marinating in a topic for 12 hours and pacing, thinking, and then writing at like 4 a.m. I’m always turning things in after a sleepless night. I have very irregular sleep hours as a result.

Which of your articles should be made into a movie?

I would love to do a show about sandwiches of the world.

What is the best journalistic career advice you ever received?

My mom said, “Don’t go into journalism.” My hubris was unbounded, and like a Greek hero, I’ve been punished for it.

What makes you think journalism is doomed?

I don’t think it’s doomed. I think it's just exceptionally hard to get a job that is steady and has health insurance. That is never a good sign for an industry. I think there are a lot of interesting things going on, like more worker-owned cooperatives. I’m part of Flaming Hydra now.

I think we need to move away from these models that have made it more and more and more precarious. There’s no shortage of people who want to do fascinating, cutting-edge reporting, who are excellent writers, who are passionate about what they do. But there’s just less and less and less security, and that’s not tenable. And so whether it’s worker-owned cooperatives, whether that’s nonprofits, we need a new model. Because a nation starved of information is a nation where power is not in the hands of the people.

And what makes you hopeful for the future of journalism?

Not to repeat myself, but I love seeing these worker-owned cooperatives rising up. There’s more every day, like Flaming Hydra. There’s a new music journalism cooperative [Hearing Things]. There’s The Flytrap, focusing on feminism. It’s people getting together to make their own security, make their own collectives, so that we don’t all have to be our own publicists, our own atomized personalities, our own sort of hype men. People can write and have a sense that they’re part of something and have comradeship.

We don’t want to make video content. We don’t want to sell ourselves. That’s how I scrape by, but every minute you’re promoting, you’re not writing, you’re not thinking of your next idea. You’re trying to get people to subscribe. And that’s tough. So I’m hoping that these cooperatives are significant for the future.

"A predilection for abyss-gazing”: Why Talia Lavin is drawn to writing about the far right

The journalist and Wild Faith author on covering extremism and, surprisingly, sandwiches

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Further reading from Talia Lavin

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