Jon Krakauer with David Grann: Into Thin Air, Thirty Years On
Jon Krakauer revisits his Everest reporting thirty years later in conversation with David Grann — on ambition, risk, memory, and the stories time reshapes.
Why we picked this
Two writers who have staked their careers on the limits of human ambition — one who survived Everest, one who reconstructed the Osage murders and a doomed Antarctic expedition — talking about what we owe the stories we tell.
Thirty years after the 1996 Everest disaster that killed eight climbers and made Into Thin Air one of the defining works of adventure journalism, Jon Krakauer returns to the story — what he got right, what he missed, and what a generation of distance reveals. The book made him famous and haunted him in equal measure. This is a conversation about both.
David Grann is one of the few writers working today whose books carry equivalent moral weight. Killers of the Flower Moon, The Wager, The Lost City of Z — each one excavates catastrophe with surgical patience. As interlocutor, he’ll push past the adventure surface to the harder questions underneath: responsibility, complicity, the ethics of bearing witness.
Expect a conversation that sits in the uncomfortable space between narrative and accountability — the territory both writers know best.