David Grann

The biggest difference with Twitter and writing long form is you're part of a virtual community where you know people, or think you know them, through their links.

You think of the rainforest as this incredibly abundant place of fauna and animals and flora. This great, rich wilderness. And yet it is such a biological battlefield in which everything is competing.

I don't camp; I don't hike. I hate bugs, and I'm phobic of snakes.

I laugh at absurdity hardest, then stories, then observations, then bearded men on roller skates.

My father who in this case was an obsessive life-long storyteller, and by a very peculiar trick of my father's. My father would tell a very, very long story, and the punch line would be in Yiddish.

If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!