The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Kimon de Greef
July 28, 2026 at 03:30PM
I was introduced to Kimon de Greef’s work this spring when I was producing our Longreads questionnaire with Patrick Radden Keefe. In his response to a question on the last book he read, Keefe mentioned de Greef’s “totally wild” book called The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. I immediately googled it and requested a copy. With a title like that, how could you not?
The Ego Trip, which will be released on August 4, expands on the story de Greef explored in his 2022 New Yorker feature, “The Pied Piper of Psychedelic Toads.” It’s as fascinating as the title promises: a deeply reported book on the rise and fall of a Mexican doctor who built a psychedelic movement around smoking the secretions of the Sonoran Desert toad.
De Greef’s other stories are just as compulsively readable, dropping us into worlds that most of us have never even thought about and introducing us to memorable characters: There’s a Syrian immigrant trapper in New York who communicates with raccoons and refuses to kill them, and a Guyanese importer trying to do right in a world of songbird smuggling. There’s a Native American woman unable to harvest wild white sage on Southern California land stripped bare by poachers, and miners searching for leftover gold in South Africa’s illegal mines.
What ties this reporting together is de Greef’s eye for complex stories in offbeat industries and underworlds, and his interest in the tensions between desire and regulation, love and exploitation. A journalist from South Africa, de Greef also co-authored the book Poacher, a firsthand account on the illicit abalone trade.
Next week, we’ll have an excerpt from The Ego Trip for you. In the meantime, dive into de Greef’s questionnaire and get to know the author behind the book.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in London and grew up in Cape Town, South Africa.
What places feel like home?
My parents returned to South Africa when I was 1. We lived in a neighborhood called Observatory. I moved back here to live in a student house in my early 20s, and a few years ago I returned for a third time with my wife, who I met here too. At this point I might be in Obs forever.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
I studied ecology at university and gained an appreciation for the wonder of evolutionary biology—the idea, essentially, that all life is connected, both in the present and backward through deep time to a common ancestor. It blows my mind whenever I think of it. I later researched abalone poaching for a master’s thesis and it changed how I thought about history, politics, and the law. Since then I’ve often gravitated to stories where inequality and crime intersect with the natural environment.
What is your favorite time of day?
Currently it’s when my baby daughter wakes up early in the morning and I get to hang out with her.
What are you really good at?
Catching flies with my bare hands.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
A wet suit from my family when I was 10. They buried it on the beach and my uncle Cleon pretended to discover it. I started bodyboarding afterward and it changed my life in many ways.
Describe your favorite meal.
My late grandmother Vonni’s chicken guvetsi, a Greek dish made with orzo noodles. It’s been my favorite since before I can remember.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
I wish I could write in silence but my office is on a busy street and I’m unusually sensitive to noise, so I use noise-canceling headphones. These days I’ve been alternating between ambient music and progressive psytrance—it felt appropriate for the book.
Where do you do your best thinking?
Often while free-writing longhand (I should do that more often) or after a swim.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
I developed chronic foot pain in my late 20s. While I was recovering, I got an assignment from Audubon magazine to report on a conservation initiative deep in the rainforests of Madagascar. We would be hiking most of the way there. I was close to broke and badly needed the work. To get out, I walked something like 20 miles in a day. It was grueling but I made it through, and for whatever reason my freelance career seemed to gather momentum afterward.
Where do you like to read?
In bed early at night before falling asleep.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
I started reporting a story about toad poaching in 2020 and imagined it would be 2,500 words or so. That one pulled me in pretty deep.
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
The New Yorker. Harper’s for its distinctive sensibility and offbeat stories that nobody else would publish. I’ve also been enjoying the new magazine Now Voyager.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
“The Hunt For El Chapo” by Patrick Radden Keefe is a certain platonic ideal for me. Panoramic reporting and a sense of effortless intimacy with material that’s notoriously difficult to source. Plus the writing is incredibly smooth.
What was the last book you read?
I just finished Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. I had read the title story but not the final one, about a young man’s summer job in a logging camp. It’s so singular in tone and so richly observed and reminded me how beautiful and timeless writing can be.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
A story I did for The New Yorker about illicit gold mining in South Africa, something I’d wanted to write about for many years and am hoping to dig into further.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Jumping in the sea. Sitting in a sauna. Talking about it with my wife.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
John Steinbeck, particularly Cannery Row. I enjoy his humor and character sketches, but most of all I love how he writes about animals and biology.
What words do you overuse?
“Marginal,” “entrenched,” “booming,” “illicit.” Since writing about psychedelics, “radically” and “profoundly.”
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
At risk of sounding like an old man, watching archival cricket footage on Facebook.
What superpower would you like to have?
The gift of easy sleep.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I appreciate the stoicism of donkeys and the playfulness of seals.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Go for a walk in the neighborhood or exchange growls with my daughter.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
A cricket bat, a ball, the rules, and two wickets (should be more but we’re out of space) so that the game can be reconstituted after the apocalypse.
What does your writing space look like?
After working from home for more than a decade, I now share an office with a documentary filmmaker just up the road from where I live. It has big windows and boxes of notes on the floor for my next book project and is upstairs from a good coffee shop, which is unfortunate because right now I’m not drinking caffeine.
Kimon de Greef is a journalist from South Africa and the author of The Ego Trip, an investigative nonfiction book about psychedelic toads, published by Doubleday. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York, The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, National Geographic, and other publications. He has coauthored a book about abalone poaching and holds a conservation biology master’s from the University of Cape Town.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/07/28/questionnaire-kimon-de-greef/
via IFTTT
Watch