The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Patrick Radden Keefe
April 8, 2026 at 03:30PM
Patrick Radden Keefe guides us deep inside worlds that most of us would otherwise never enter. The New Yorker staff writer has reported from inside crime families, corporate drug-dealing dynasties, the corridors of political power, and the upper reaches of the art world. Wherever he goes, he returns with sweeping true stories that read like page-turning fiction. “He is one of the last household names in nonfiction at a time when the entire future of the enterprise—writing—is up in the air,” Jonah E. Bromwich wrote in last week’s New York Times profile.
Keefe’s books include the best-sellers Rogues and Say Nothing, which was the basis for FX’s limited series. His New Yorker pieces are a masterclass in long-form journalism. Consider “A Loaded Gun,” which investigates the dark past of Amy Bishop, the University of Alabama in Huntsville shooter; “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” his profile of the Sackler family, which became the seed for Empire of Pain; and “Money on the Wall,” his deep dive into art dealer Larry Gagosian. His stories are meticulously reported and propulsively told—the kind of longread we can’t help but devour in one sitting.
In 2024, Keefe published “The Oligarch’s Son,” the story of 19-year-old Zac Brettler, who mysteriously fell to his death from a fifth-floor apartment in London, and his parents’ obsessive search for the truth. Longreads readers made it one of the most popular editors’ picks that year, and it’s easy to see why. It’s Keefe at his best: a morality tale that propels us into worlds of power, money, and corruption, told with the pacing of a cinematic thriller.
That piece evolved into his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, out this week. If you haven’t read the original story, now’s the perfect time to dive in. Enjoy your time with Keefe here, and don’t forget to pick up a copy.
Where did you grow up?
Dorchester, a neighborhood in Boston.
What places feel like home?
Boston still feels like home, though I haven’t lived there in 30 years. New York City feels more like home than the New York suburbs, even though I’ve lived in the suburbs for more than a decade. Weirdly, London feels very familiar to me. I’ve lived there—for grad school in 2000–01, and again while we were filming the television adaptation of Say Nothing, and I’ve spent a lot of time there over the past three years, researching this book.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
Reading has shaped me pretty considerably: the worlds that a book or magazine article could open up, the possibilities a piece of writing could map. Close friends have influenced me, mostly in good ways (ha). Writers I admire.
What is your favorite time of day?
I’m built for the morning. I get up early and love the quiet and the sense of promise, the whole day stretched ahead of me. I do my best writing in the morning, and always have, powered by strong espresso.
What are you really good at?
Being a dinner party guest.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
I don’t know if this would rank as single-all-time-best but my British publisher just gave me a gift to mark the release of London Falling: a beautiful early edition of V.S. Pritchett’s London Perceived.
Describe your favorite meal.
Crispy Chinese watercress salad at SriPraPhai in Woodside, Queens. I’ve been eating it for decades, would select it as my final meal.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
I’m more of a silence guy with every passing year.
Where do you do your best thinking?
I never did any distance running until the pandemic, at which point I was already a creaky 40-something, but then fell into it hard and started training for marathons. It turned out to be incredibly helpful for writing. Ideas and turns of phrase shake loose on a long run. It’s thrilling.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
The summer after I finished eighth grade, in 1990, a friend of my family named Rose Moss invited me to join her on a research trip to South Africa. She was an anti-Apartheid writer, returning to Johannesburg as the system finally collapsed, to report a book on the anti-Apartheid movement, Shouting at the Crocodile. Rose knew I was obsessed with Mandela—who had been released from prison months earlier—and thought it would be a good experience for me to accompany her, ostensibly as her research assistant, though I didn’t actually provide much help. My parents, for some reason, agreed. It was a time of great upheaval, and I witnessed history unfold, very rapidly, all around me. It changed my life.
Where do you like to read?
In bed (novels) or a comfy chair in my home office (nonfiction).
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
It’s kind of a daily thing . . .
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Big fan of new magazines! What a thrill that there are these great new venues for writing. I love The Fence, and Equator, and The Dial, and—bonus, Now Voyager!
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
I revisit Larissa MacFarquhar profiles the way other people take vitamins. The opening of her Richard Posner profile from 2001 may be my favorite lede of all time. Ahem, if you’ll indulge me:
Richard Posner is introduced. He extends a limp hand, smiles tepidly, and says something polite. He is long and spare, his eyes pale as a fish, his clothing conventional, his features thin. He moves delicately, seeming to hover rather than stand: he has about him the distant, omniscient, ectoplasmic air of the butler in a haunted house. He escorts his visitor to the waiting room of his personality, where the visitor will sit, lulled by the bland ambience of the place, until it is time for murder.
What was the last book you read?
I am reading—in galleys because it’s not yet out—a book that is totally wild: The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence, by Kimon de Greef.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
I would never pick favorites.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Running! (See above.) Music (almost any kind). The knowledge that my mortgage is due.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
One incredible privilege of writing for The New Yorker is that a bunch of my colleagues are writers whose work I read with ravenous appreciation. I’m always inspired by the work of Ian Parker, to pick just one, particularly the dryness of his tone.
What words do you overuse?
Indeed. Crooked. Adverbs in general.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
I will rewatch certain movies, which are not exactly considered transcendental masterpieces, again and again. Like I’m not even going to tell you how many times I’ve watched Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006). More than 10, you ask? To quote José Yero, the Colombian trafficker in the movie: “Yes . . . No. . . Maybe so.”
What superpower would you like to have?
Somewhere along the line I lost the power to take daytime naps. I want it back.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
A duck. Doing my best to keep all that antic paddling I’m doing invisible above the waterline.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Call my sister, who lives in Zurich and more reliably than anyone will make me laugh.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
Honestly at this point I’d put my iPhone and the iPhones of my wife and two children. The fifth item would be a little postcard for any future person who might open the capsule, just warning them, basically, saying, “Caution.”
What does your writing space look like?
Old teak desk, bulletin board with my murder wall of images and details for the story I’m working on, books on the shelves, books on the floor, canyons of books and papers. All the happy clutter of my mind.
Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and author of The New York Times bestsellers Rogues, Empire of Pain and Say Nothing, as well as two earlier nonfiction books: The Snakehead and Chatter.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/04/08/questionnaire-patrick-radden-keefe/
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