#47: Rebecca Mead, staff writer, the New Yorker
Simon and Eleanor speak with Rebecca Mead, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker magazine who recently returned to the UK after many years in the United States. Rebecca spoke about her early career as a fact-checker, how she moved into writing her own features, first at New York magazine and later for the New Yorker, and lifted the lid on some of the internal processes at the celebrated magazine, from the process of assigning stories to the practicalities of spending months reporting individual assignments. She also spoke about My Life in Middlemarch, her book length tribute to George Eliot's great nineteenth century novel.