My friend Tom Wentworth turned me on to John McPhee some years ago, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Here, Matt Dellinger of TNY interviews him:
You’ve written about truckers and riverboat-barge pilots and UPS workers, and now coal trains. Why these subjects?
JOHN MCPHEE: This is part of a series of articles about people who work in freight transportation. It will be incorporated in a book titled “Uncommon Carriers,” to be published next May by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. The phrase “people who work in” is here because these pieces aren’t tomes about the economics of freight—it’s about the people who work in freight transportation, that’s the point I want to emphasize.
More here.