Andy Greenwald covers television for Grantland.

“People are enthusiastic about TV. People want to read about it. They want to talk about it. They want to know more. They want to extend its presence in their lives. People used to talk about the water cooler show, but the internet is that water cooler now and people want to be part of the conversation.”

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Alexis Okeowo, a foreign correspondent, has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Businessweek.

“Nigeria is a deeply sexist country. It can be difficult for people to take you seriously. But that also has its benefits, because it’s very easy to disarm your subjects. If I’m interviewing people who underestimate me, I can get them to open up because they somehow think that I’m naïve or I don’t know what I’m doing. So I don’t mind if some sexist general or banker thinks I’m this young little student who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. As long as you tell me what I want to know, it’s great.”

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Rachel Syme has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Grantland, and more.

“You have this sense that you’re bonding, but at the same time you're also going to betray them. Because if you hear this quote that they say or you see it in a mannerism, you write it in your notebook and you think ‘I got it.’”

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Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex & Money.

“It's the result of listening, of feeling listened to, that people open up. I look like a crazy person when I do interviews, because sometimes someone will be describing something and I will close my eyes and try to picture what they’re telling me. And if I can’t picture the moment they’re describing I’ll just try to dig in a little bit more.”

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Scott Anderson is a war correspondent and novelist. He’s written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and more.

“I really feel that what’s at the root of so many wars now, modern wars, unconventional wars, it really just comes down to a bunch of young guys with access to guns coming up with a pretext to rape and murder and pillage and steal from their neighbors.”

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Dayna Tortorici is the editor of n+1.

“You can't fetishize conflict so much. Because conflict does generate a lot of good work, but it also inhibits a lot of good work. I think people do their best work when they feel good. Or at least don't feel like shit. ... So I've tried to create a culture of mutual encouragement. Especially when you're not paying anybody, that's all you can really offer.”

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Adam Platt is the restaurant critic for New York.

“My job was described to me recently as ‘the last great job of the 20th century.’ I think there might be something to that.”

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Erik Larson is the author of several books, including The Devil in the White City. His latest is Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.

"I realized then and there, that afternoon: the thing that was going to make this interesting was the juxtaposition of light and dark, good and evil. This monument to civic goodwill versus this monument to the dark side of human nature. ... But that was really hard to pull off. And, frankly, on the eve of publication I was pretty convinced my career was over. I'd violated every single concept of good narrative."

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Josh Dean has written for GQ, Fast Company, New York, and more. His latest piece, "The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang," was just published by The Atavist.

“I sort of reject the whole idea of something being beneath me. There are obviously some stories I wouldn’t do or that I have no interest in, but this job is fun and should be fun. And I wouldn’t turn something down that seems like a fun thing for me to do just because maybe the story is not something that 10,000 people are going to tweet about. I don’t give a shit.”

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Mac McClelland has written for Mother Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Matter and others. Her book Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story came out this week.

“I would just suddenly start sobbing, which is not something I usually do. I felt like I needed to be drunk all the time, which is also not something I usually do. I was having nightmares and I was having flashbacks. I was terrified and confused and disoriented all the time. I was a completely different person, completely unrecognizable even to myself.”

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Rukmini Callimachi covers ISIS for The New York Times. Part 1 of this episode is available here.

“Ever since I started in journalism, I feel like I'm perpetually winded. Like I'm just running as hard as I can to stay ahead of this train that's crashing. The caboose is falling off the back and I'm trying to run faster than the train to get to this very limited pool of amazing jobs. Once I got overseas I would say a prayer every night for the amazing life I was finally able to lead.”

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Rukmini Callimachi covers ISIS for The New York Times. Part 2 of this episode is available here.

“Nine out of 10 Americans said they were aware of James Foley's execution. That's a huge win for ISIS. That's what they want. I think they've realized that journalists are the crème de la crème as far as targets. And that's a really scary thing for our profession.”

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Jack Shafer covers the media for Politico.

“This is a true story, not a ‘Brian Williams story’: my first report card said ‘Jack is a very good student, but he has a tendency to start fights on the playground and bring them back into the classroom.’ That's been my career style — start a fight and bring it back to the classroom.”

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Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer. She is a columnist for VICE and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review and Vanity Fair.

“As long as the marginalized communities I’m writing about don’t think I’m full of shit, that’s success to me.”

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Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and GQ.

“My writing career was something that was always about to happen, just as soon as the baby falls asleep, just as soon as I finish watching this five-hour bout of As the World Turns, just as soon as... What do you do when you realize that you have not been doing the thing you were going to do? You're in your 30s. You get to work.”

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Anand Gopal has written for The Wall Street Journal, Harper’s and Foreign Policy. He’s the author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes.

“When I got to the Taliban, I got out my notebook and tried to ask the hard-hitting questions. ‘What are you fighting for? Why are you doing this? What’s happening with the civilians you’re killing?’ And of course you do that and you get boilerplate answers and icy stares. So I just started asking them questions about their childhood. ... People love to talk about themselves and he began to open up and very subtly something shifted and it no longer became about the war and America versus the Taliban, it became about him being an Afghan and his experience.”

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Alex Blumberg is a former producer for This American Life and Planet Money. Last year he founded Gimlet Media, a podcast network, and hosts its first show, StartUp.

“When someone starts talking about something difficult, when they get unexpectedly emotional, your normal human reaction is to sort of comfort and steer away. To say, ‘Oh I’m sorry, let’s move on.’ What you need to do, if you want good tape, is to say, ‘Talk more about how you’re feeling right now.’ It feels like a horrible question to ask. It feels like you're going against your every instinct as a decent human being to go toward the pain that this person is experiencing.”

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Nicholas Carlson writes for Business Insider. His book Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! came out this week.

“To me people are what’s really interesting. Marissa Mayer is a once in a lifetime subject. She’s full of contradictions. … There are a million business stories, but if you don’t have that character at the center then you’re lost.”

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Hanna Rosin is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a founder and editor at DoubleX.

“I often think of reporting as dating, or even speed dating. You’re looking for someone where there’s a spark there between you and them. Sometimes that happens right away and sometimes it takes forever. ... You have to determine if they're reflective, friendly, open. It could be love at first sight and they're still all wrong, which is really heartbreaking.”

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Meghan Daum's latest book of essays is The Unspeakable.

“As writers we think, well there has to be closure, there has to be a beginning middle end, the character has to go through a change. And then in life we're supposed to have some sort of arc or aha moment, as if the experience isn't legitimate unless we get something out of it. That's so culturally constructed, as they say. It's so artificial.”

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Katie J.M. Baker is a reporter for BuzzFeed News.

“I went to Steubenville a year after the sexual assault to cover their first big football game of the season and I was face-to-face with these people who I had been writing about without knowing much about them. From far away it seems like, do these details matter? Do we care if these people’s lives get messed up when the narrative is so strong, when Steubenville now stands for more awareness around rape culture? But when you’re there, of course it matters. After that piece I realized I didn’t want to blog anymore and I wanted to just focus on reporting.”

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Alec Wilkinson is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

“My hero was Joseph Mitchell, that was how you did reporting. There was nothing conniving about it or cunning — you just simply kept returning and kept returning.”

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Emma Carmichael, a former editor at Deadspin and The Hairpin, is the editor in chief of Jezebel.

"Online feminism has more and more rules lately. There are only so many things you can say. And while our opinions are getting more constrained online, personal feminism and face-to-face conversations are looser and more complicated and don't go by any rules. ... The ideal with Jezebel is getting to a point where you can say, 'This is what I think, so who gives a fuck.'"

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Reihan Salam is the executive editor of National Review.

"I’m incredibly curious about other people. I’m curious about what they think of as the constraints operating on their lives. Why do they think what they think? If I weren’t doing this job, I’d want to be a high school guidance counselor."

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Jake Halpern has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine and is a contributor to This American Life. His latest book is Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld.

"I test out my stories on my kids. You should be able to tell any story, now matter how complicated, to a seven-year-old in a way that they understand. If you can't, that probably means that either a) you're telling the story wrong or b) it's not really a story."

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