Rafe Bartholomew is the former features editor at Grantland and the author of Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me.

“I never saw it as something negative because [my dad] comes out, to me, at the end, extremely heroic. … He becomes this dad who I idolized as a bartender, a guy who would hang out with me and make me laugh, a guy I just adored almost every step of the way. I mean, of course, everybody gets into fights. But to me it was always so obvious that he had overcome the problems in his childhood, he’d overcome his own drinking problem, he’d done all these things, and by the time I was older, he’d even found a way to get back into writing and self-publish a couple of books of poems about the bar. So he’s sort of managed to tick off all those goals, just maybe not on the same schedule, maybe not in the most normal way.”

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Helen Rosner is a food correspondent at The New Yorker.

“I believe the things that are really important to me are structure over all and—forgive me, I’ve said this on other podcasts before—if I were going to get a tattoo this is what I would get a tattoo of is that it doesn’t matter what you say, it only matters what they hear. It’s my job to make sure the gulf between those two things is as narrow as possible and there’s as little ambiguity between what I say and what you hear. It’s never easy, but it’s certainly easier in the realm of arguable objectivity. To create emotion in a reader requires a huge amount of really thoughtful work on the part of the writer in a way that forces you as a writer to remove yourself from the emotion you’re creating in the reader. If I to set you up for sadness, I have to create emotional stakes. I have to create investment in whoever I’m talking about or whatever the story’s about. The craft of making stakes and setting up a potential downfall, a potential loss, whatever it may be I think is not something you can do well if you’re feeling the feeling you’re trying to create in the reader.”

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Amanda Hess, a staff writer at Slate, has also written for Pacific Standard, GOOD, and ESPN the Magazine.

"I ended up not loving the fact that I was getting a bunch of calls from MSNBC and CNN, who mostly wanted to talk about people threatening to rape and kill me and only a tiny bit about the story I'd written. ... It was tiring, and it seemed dismissive of me as a person. It's a strange thing to become somebody else's story, especially when the story is: You're a victim of an insane online harasser. That's who you are."

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Ted Conover is the author of five books and the recent Harper's article "The Way of All Flesh."

"My identity is a rubber band. It can stretch that way and it can stretch this way. When I get home it goes mostly back into the shape it's been, but not completely. And it's that not completely that is interesting and makes me who I am."</i>

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Ezra Edelman is the director of O.J.: Made in America.

“When I say what I learned is that America is even more fucked up than I had previously thought, it’s that—the superficiality of it. How we are willingly seduced by these shiny people and these shiny things. And, again, when I looked at O.J.’s trajectory, that was an operating principle.”

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Reeves Wiedeman is a reporter at New York Magazine and the author of the new book Billion Dollar Loser.

“You get inside these companies and … you assume everything is running based on models and numbers and then you get inside and it’s just people. And sometimes they have MBAs and sometimes they don’t. … At the end of the day, whether you’re running a media company or an office space company, it’s all people making these decisions and they often do very strange, contradictory, and ultimately unsuccessful things.”

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E. Alex Jung is a senior writer for Vulture and New York. 

”When I'm in that space, I try to be a sponge. I'll just absorb whatever's happening or going on, and I'll be down to do mostly anything. I was actually thinking recently about what my limits would be in a profile. I was like—heroin? I don't think I would do that.”

Nona Willis Aronowitz, an editor and author, writes a sex and love advice column for Teen Vogue. Her new book is Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution.

“I'm getting a lot of emails from people saying basically ‘You've inspired me to break up with my man tomorrow.’ Or ‘I may not ever break up with my man, but I'm starting to tell the truth, at least to myself, about my relationship.’ And I think a lot of people — even though I think being open about your feelings and acceptance of all kinds of lifestyles are two tenants of modern society — I still think there's a lot of silence around dissatisfaction around sex and love.”

Michael J. Mooney is a staff writer at D Magazine and the author of The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle.

“There are some elements of crime stories that are so absurd that it’s funny, and so working on the “How Not to Get Away With Murder” story, it was actually really funny thinking about it for a long time. Until I met Nancy Howard, the woman who was shot in the face and has one eye now. This is her entire life, and it was destroyed. This is not a crime story to her, it’s her life.”

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Dr. Jelani Cobb is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of three books, including The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. He teaches journalism at Columbia University.

“Ralph Wiley — the sports writer, late Ralph Wiley — told me something when I was 25 or so, and he was so right. He said I should never fall in love with anything I’ve written. … The second thing he told me was, ‘You won’t get there overnight, and believe me, you don’t want to.’ I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t get it when he told me that. I was like — why would I not want to get there overnight? Now I’m like: Thank God I didn’t get there overnight. Because there’s so much writing I would have to explain.”

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Jim Nelson is the editor-in-chief of GQ.

“One of the things that was initially a challenge was we would all think of ‘the print side’ and ‘the digital side.’ Now what we all think about is, ‘Okay, stop saying GQ.com and GQ the print edition. It’s just GQ!’ And once you cross that line, you don’t ever want to go back to it. I can’t imagine. The job has changed so much, even in the last three years, that when I look back, I think, ‘God, I was just such a quaint little fucker.’”

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Sean Fennessy is the editor-in-chief of The Ringer and a former Grantland editor. He hosts The Big Picture.

"What I try to do is listen to people as much as I can. And try to be compassionate. I think it’s really hard to be on the internet. This is an internet company, in a lot of ways. We have a documentary coming out that’s going to be on linear television that’s really exciting. Maybe we’ll have more of those. But for the moment, podcast, writing, video: it’s internet. [The internet] is an unmediated space of angst and meanness and a willingness to tell people when they’re bad, even when they’ve worked hard on something. That’s like the number one anxiety that I feel like we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis with everybody, myself included."

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Casey Cep has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic. She is the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.

“I want to meet all of these expectations. I want my book to be a page-turner. I want it to be a beautiful literary object. I want it to sell. I want it to do all of these things. But at the end of the day, I just want to feel like I’ve honored this commitment between writer and reader, and writer and source. And those are sometimes in conflict.”

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Susan Casey is the former editor of O and the author of three New York Times bestselling books. Her latest is Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins.

“The funny thing is people often say, ‘You must be fearless.’ I’m always afraid of whatever it is. But for whatever reason—I think it’s partly naïvety, partly just overwhelming curiosity—I am also not going to let fear stop me from doing things even if I feel it. Unless it’s that pure…you do have to listen to your body sometimes if it tells you not to do something that could result in you really never coming up from falling on that 70-foot wave.”

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Michael Pollan writes for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker and is the author of nine books. His latest is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

“I don’t like writing as an expert. I’m fine doing public speeches as an expert. Or writing op-ed pieces as an expert. But as a writer, it’s a killer. Nobody likes an expert. Nobody likes to be lectured at. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written, I’m kind of an idiot on page one. I am the naïve fish out of water. I’m learning though. The narrative that we always have as writers is our own education on the topic. We can recreate the process of learning that's behind the book.”

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Jennifer Senior is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her article ”What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind” won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. Her most recent article is ”The Ones We Sent Away.”

“I'm at the point where I'm only thinking about the big questions and the difficulty of being a human as what matter most. That's what I want to keep focusing on. Our common frailties, our common bonds, our common difficulties. Because clearly we are not going to bond politically as a nation, right? … But we can bond over our kids with disabilities. About the fact that we grieve, that we love, that we lose people. That we have friends that we love, friends that we hate. We have friendships that we miss, we have friendships that we can't live without.”

Carl Zimmer, a columnist for the New York Times and a national correspondent at STAT, writes about science.

“[Criticism] doesn’t change the truth. You know? Global warming is still happening. Vaccines still work. Evolution is still true. No matter what someone on Twitter or someone in an administration is going to say, it’s still true. So, we science writers have to still be letting people know about what science has discovered, what we with our minds have discovered about the world—to the best of our abilities. That’s our duty as science writers, and we can’t let these things scare us off.”

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Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

“I think the job is just paying a bunch of attention. If you're a person like me, where thoughts and worries are intruding on your consciousness all the time, it is a great relief to have something to just over-describe and over-pay-attention to—and kind of just give all of your latent, usually anxious attention to this one thing. That, to me, is a great joy.”

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Donovan X. Ramsey is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in GQ, WSJ Magazine, The Atlantic, and many other publications.

“I actually got into writing about criminal justice ... because I was curious about Black life. But that meant the only way I was able to do that was I had to kind of do this really often depressing slice of Black life. And there’s so much more. And there’s so much beauty in the lived experiences of Black people. … There are so many stories that just never get told about Black life. One, I have a connection to being a Black person, but then being a Black person who has the benefit of a really good education, and I’ve been given some shots here and there… it feels like a duty. If I’m not going to tell these stories, then who?”

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Grant Wahl was the founder of Fútbol with Grant Wahl, a longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, and the author of The Beckham Experiment and Masters of Modern Soccer. He died on December 10, covering the World Cup in Qatar. This interview was recorded in January 2016.

“I never would have predicted I would do soccer full time. And that’s happened. I’d love to say that this was all planned and inevitable but it really wasn’t.”

Michael Pollan is a contributing writer for New York Times Magazine, the host of Netflix's How To Change Your Mind, and the author of nine books. The latest is This Is Your Mind On Plants.

“I have found myself at two distinct points in my history having this transition from being the journalist, learning at the feet of these people, to becoming an advocate. And it’s an awkward role for a journalist, but at a certain point it would be kind of false to pretend you didn't have points of view, that there weren't directions in which you think the world should go. And the great thing about doing narrative nonfiction is that editors cut you a fair amount of slack at the end of a 10,000–word piece to say what you think.”

Brittany Luse is the host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.

“One of the things I love about this job is everything is practice. I love it. It's like if a show is great and everyone loves it, you gotta put on another one. You just gotta do it again. And if the show didn't quite do what you'd hoped or set out to do in your mind and in your heart, you gotta do another one. I just love it. You can never feel too good and you can never feel too bad.”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times and the author of Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel.

“As a profile writer, the skill I have is getting in the room and staying in the room until someone is like, ‘Why is this bitch still in the room? Get her out of there!’ It’s a journalistic skill that is not a fluffy skill. There are people who are always actively trying to prevent your story, prevent you from seeing it, from seeing the things that would be good to see. There’s a lot of convincing, comforting and listening going on. And there’s a lot of dealing with the fact that somebody in the middle of talking to you can suddenly decide that you are the worst. Those things are very tense and it’s a specific skill that I have that can defray all those things. Or it lets me stay.”

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Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent and National Magazine Award winner.

"I find it satisfying to be able to give a voice to people that sort of get lost…You know, when these big horrible things happen, and the spotlight is very briefly on them, and then it moves away, and it's not that I'm dragging them out and forcing them to 'Relive your horrible moments!' It's more a thing of, 'If you'd like to relive your horrible moment, if you want people to know what actually happened, talk to me. I will tell your story.'"

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Gabriel Snyder is the editor-in-chief of The New Republic.

“I had a new job, I was new to the place, and I came to it with a great deal of respect but didn’t feel like I had any special claim to it. But in that moment I realized that there were all of these people who wanted to see the place die. And that the only way The New Republic was going to continue was by someone wanting to see it continue, and I realized I was one of those people now.”

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