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Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper\u2019s, and many other publications. His latest book is Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.\n\n"In the end, I don\u2019t care how famous you get, how widely read you are during your lifetime. You\u2019re going to be forgotten. And you\u2019re going to have five or six fans in the end. It\u2019s going to be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are going to say, Oh, yeah, he was big. \u2026 So I think the key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you\u2019re only doing this for yourself. \u2026 So maybe do your best stuff for yourself and for the three, four, five people who know in the coming century that you ever existed. That\u2019s all you need to do."\n\nThanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.\n\nShow notes:\n\n@nicholsonbaker8\nnicholsonbaker.com\nThe Mezzanine (Grove Press \u2022 1988)\nBaseless (Penguin Press \u2022 2020)\n10:00 Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster \u2022 2009)\n10:00 "Wrong Answer" (Harper's \u2022 Sept 2013)\n11:00 Room Temperature (Grove Press \u2022 2010)\n11:00 U and I (Random House \u2022 2000)\n11:00 The Fermata(2000)\n12:00 "The Projector" (New Yorker \u2022 Mar 1994)\n12:00 The Size of Thoughts (Vintage Contemporaries \u2022 1996)\n13:00 "The Author vs. the Library" (New Yorker \u2022 Oct 1996)\n19:00 Double Fold (Vintage \u2022 2002)\n30:00 Lab 257 (Michael Carroll \u2022 Willam Morrow Paperbacks \u2022 2005)\n33:00 Longform Podcast #192: Seymour Hersh\n33:00 The Killing of Osama Bin Laden (Seymour Hersh \u2022 Verso \u2022 2017)\n33:00 Longform Podcast #321: Nicholas Schmidle\n33:00 "Getting Bin Laden" (Nicholas Schmidle \u2022 New Yorker \u2022 Aug 2011)\n46:00 Baker's New Yorker archive\n\n\xa0\n\n\xa0\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices