Carter Sherman, the Guardian journalist who cohosts the podcast Stateside with Kai and Carter, used a new Verge weekend questionnaire to give readers the useful biographical data that LinkedIn tends to omit: she runs on French press coffee, keeps too many browser tabs open, and was unnerved as a kid by Nintendo’s forest dungeon ambience. Reasonable.
In the interview with The Verge’s Terrence O’Brien, Sherman named The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as the game she remembers most fondly. Her specific memory was not a boss fight or the time-loop puzzle box of Hyrule, but the music in the Deku Tree dungeons, which frightened her when she was young. Nintendo’s 1998 game was good at making a child feel alone inside a tree full of skulltulas. No ray tracing required.
The questionnaire is light by design, but it lands alongside Sherman’s more serious work. O’Brien described Sherman as a journalist who has long covered sex, gender, reproductive health, and the political fights around those subjects. Her résumé includes work as a senior reporter at Vice and bylines in Elle, Ms. magazine, and Los Angeles magazine, according to The Verge. She has also received a Scripps Howard Award, a National Press Club Journalism Award, and four Emmy nominations.
A book about sex after several institutional earthquakes
Sherman’s book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future, examines how internet culture and polarized politics have reshaped sex and relationships. The Verge said the book covers fights over sex education, abortion access, and the broader social changes following #MeToo, the pandemic, and the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Asked what work she was proudest of, Sherman pointed to that book. She said she interviewed more than 100 people under 30 while reporting it, focusing on their experiences with sex and their views of it after those political and cultural shocks. She framed the project as a culmination of a decade reporting on reproductive health, gender, and sexuality across print and video.
Coffee, tabs, notes, and concert tickets
The rest of Sherman’s answers sketch the operating system around the work. Her most necessary tool is a French press, with her Seattle background offered as her credential for coffee fussiness. Asked how many browser tabs she had open, she gave the mathematically evasive answer: there is no limit.
For getting unstuck, Sherman said she keeps a list of memorable lines in the Notes app and reads through it when she needs momentum. Recent entries she cited came from Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, and Katie Kitamura. The method is low-tech and probably more useful than another productivity app with a subscription tier.
She also told The Verge that she wishes she had written the “Happy Birthday” song, because the royalties would have been nice, and that concert tickets are worth the money. Her current obsession is Rick and Morty, which she said she raced through across its first eight seasons in roughly two weeks. For a biopic tagline, she chose a version of qualified persistence: she tried.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
