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The Longreads Questionnaire, Featuring Vauhini Vara
Apr. 22nd, 2026 10:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Last year, during a talk at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Vauhini Vara spoke about “Ghosts,” her groundbreaking 2021 essay for The Believer, about the death of her sister. “Ghosts” was written in collaboration with GPT-3, a forerunner to ChatGPT. “I was curious, as a journalist, about what this technology could mean for my own job,” Vara told her audience. “But, to be honest, I was also curious as a writer and an artist about what it would feel to use something like this to produce language.”
Since “Ghosts,” Vara’s curiosity, remarkable for its scope and depth, has made her a must-read correspondent on the shifting borders between technology and humanity. While working on her latest book, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vara provided sections to ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative chatbot, and asked it for feedback. “In the ensuing exchanges,” Vara later wrote for The Atlantic, in an essay about a wrongful-death lawsuit filed against OpenAI, “ChatGPT used all of its telltale tricks of engagement: wit, warmth, words of encouragement framed in the self-anthropomorphizing first person.” There is no credulous boosterism in her stories, and no breathless exhortation to make your life more legible for large-language models. Concerned as it is with technology, Vara’s work is fundamentally and essentially human. She is interested in the powers that shape our searches and queries; the demands we make of technology are real parts of us, and deserving of thoughtful investigation.
“Tech is a subject that can be easy to get moralistic about, but Vauhini has an open and inquisitive mind, always,” Camille Bromley, Vara’s editor at The Believer, says. That openness is “an essential quality for finding truth in the world.” It also makes Vara a dynamic presence on the page: a nimble thinker and a distinctive wit, playful with the shape of a story, a thrill in any genre she explores.
Where did you grow up?
I was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, in Canada, and we lived in other places in the Saskatchewan prairie (Balcarres, Saskatoon, Prince Albert) ’til I was 10. Then we moved to Oklahoma (Edmond, a suburb of Oklahoma City) and lived there ’til I was 12, and then to a suburb of Seattle (Mercer Island). That’s where I finished middle school and went to high school.
What places feel like home?
I still orient everywhere I’ve lived in terms of its distance to Seattle. My mom stayed there for a long time after I left for college, and a lot of my close friends are still there, including my best friend from high school.
Fort Collins, Colorado, is where I’ve lived for the past 10 years. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, by far, and it’s the place where I found a long-lasting community and finally became an active person who loves being outdoors. Also, my mom lives here now, and my sister-in-law and her family live an hour away.
We’re in Madrid, Spain, every summer for a month, and it’s where I started learning and loving Spanish; some of my closest friends are there, too. And Hyderabad, India, is where a lot of my extended family lives.
In addition: any public library, any place that feeds me dosa or idli, my karate dojo.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
My two best friends, Sophie—the one in Seattle—and Dana.
What is your favorite time of day?
Biking my son to school in the morning and then biking from there to my mom’s house for breakfast and then biking home; right after dinner when I’m full and satisfied and have topped it off with a square of chocolate and am changing into my pajamas to go sit on the couch and read while my husband’s putting our son to bed.
What are you really good at?
Falling asleep quickly and sleeping well. Quickly responding to emails (but not texts). Seeing the best in people. Giving my husband the set-up so he can make a joke that will amuse me. Mentorship. Multitasking. Remembering my dreams. Writing for magazines—may they keep existing for my lifetime and beyond.
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
When I turned 5, we were on vacation in South Dakota, and my parents got me a little traditional drum. When I turned 30, my husband and I had just gone on our honeymoon to Turkey, and he surprised me by cooking a dinner with, like, 20 of those Turkish mezes we’d loved. Dana, one of the aforementioned best friends, gives the greatest creative gifts to my kid: Multiple times, she’s sent him games that she’s designed herself, with the instructions written in Sharpie on index cards.
Describe your favorite meal.
Pappu, charu, and rice. Pappu is the Telugu word for lentils and for the dish made of lentils—it’s better known by its Hindi name, dal. Charu is the Telugu word for a brothy soup with tomato and tamarind—it’s better known by the name of rasam. For me it’s comfort food, the equivalent of chicken noodle soup or congee.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
Ambient nature sounds.
Where do you do your best thinking?
Long drives or walks.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
Living, in general?
Where do you like to read?
In bed, on the couch, on our deck, and in hotel rooms while traveling alone.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
The history of how the human species has done gray whales wrong. In this book about whales by Charles Melville Scammon, one of the most notorious whalers of the nineteenth century, he wrote, “The scene of slaughter was exceedingly picturesque and unusually exciting, especially on a calm morning, when the mirage would transform not only the boats and their crews into fantastic imagery, but the whales, as they sent forth their towering spouts of aqueous vapor, frequently tinted with blood, would appear greatly distorted.”
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
New York blows my mind with how successful they are at grabbing my and everyone else’s attention and how lively their stories always are. There’s a writer named Audrey Watters who has a Substack about how technology is being pushed into schools—it’s called Second Breakfast—which consistently features some of the most delightfully written and smart tech critique I’ve read, in general, school-related or not. And then there’s the most underrated publication out there, The Week Junior, from which our 10-year-old reads highlights to us nightly at dinner.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
If a podcast counts as a longread, I’m binging one called Adults in the Room from the Seattle public radio station KUOW. Multiple Seattle friends shared it with me, and it’s phenomenal: It’s about an unsolved, decades-old sexual abuse scandal at Seattle’s most storied high school, hosted by an investigative journalist who was a student at the high school when it happened—and played a central role in it. It unfolds with such sensitivity and complexity; I can’t say too much without giving it away. (I’m slightly biased, because I met the host, Isolde Raftery, when we were both in a journalism summer camp for high schoolers around the time that the scandal was unfolding; we’ve stayed in only intermittent touch, but I’ve admired her career since.) Also: John Carreyrou’s Satoshi Nakamoto investigation. He never definitively solves the riddle of who Nakamoto is, but the ingenious structure of the narrative—bringing us along for the ride—makes it an excellent read despite, or even because of, the inconclusiveness.
What was the last book you read?
Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow. I’ve read almost everything of hers.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
Well, my book! It’s called Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age. It has epigraphs from Audre Lorde and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o about the politics of using language—about how language can’t be divorced from its source (people, their communities). The book itself tells the story of how big technology companies have co-opted our language to enrich and empower themselves, and investigates our own complicity in that. I also use my own conversations with those companies’ products to enact the dynamic on the page: my Google searches, my Amazon reviews, and a very meta ChatGPT conversation in which I pretend I’m looking for advice on the book itself and ChatGPT proceeds to try to persuade me to write more positively about the company behind it—OpenAI—and its CEO, Sam Altman. “A visionary and a pragmatist,” it says I should call him.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Go interact with other people’s art—at a museum, a concert, a reading, whatever.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
César Aira for fiction. Rachel Aviv and John Carreyrou for journalism.
What words do you overuse?
Delightful.
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
What superpower would you like to have?
Mindreading, no question.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
I don’t identify with them at all, but I am in awe of whales. Blue whales, especially, but also, more recently, gray whales. (See above.) Moby-Dick is my favorite novel, and I will take any and all recommendations of books featuring whales.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Text my friends Sanam and Kristy to see if they want to go for a walk. Do laundry. Go use the auto-belays at the climbing gym. See if my son wants to play a board game. Take all the junk strewn around my office and organize it into neat piles. Eat. Respond to months-old text messages that I’ve neglected.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Microbiota Vault, the Dorrance Hamilton Cryo Conservation Laboratory, a really gigantic tank of water, and the Library of Congress (the latter so that whatever species come after us—with the help of the first four items—might be able to decode our languages and learn where we went wrong).
What does your writing space look like?
A haphazardly organized desk in my little office, usually. On it: a bowl made by my aforementioned friend Sanam—Sanam Emami—containing my and my son’s International Shotokan Karate Federation cards, the punch cards that give me a free day pass to the climbing gym for every 10 times I bike there, and the business card of a man I once met at a reading whose life story I promised myself I’d write but never did. Three half-alive succulents. A tealight candle holder in which I keep pens. Post-it notes that my son uses as scratch paper when he’s in my office using my computer for the algebra practice site he likes. And my computer. That said, I’m not sentimental about writing in any particular place. If I have my computer, I can do it anywhere.
Vauhini Vara is the author of Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, named a best book of the year by Esquire, Slate, Vox, and Publisher’s Weekly and a winner of the Porchlight Business Book Award. Her previous books are This is Salvaged, which was longlisted for the Story Prize and won the High Plains Book Award, and The Immortal King Rao, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also a journalist, currently working as a contributing writer for Businessweek.
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