Christie Aschwanden is a freelance science writer. Her latest book is Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery.

“I think every writer has this sort of obsession in a story that they write over and over in different forms. For me, it’s about belief and how do we decide what to believe. How do we choose what evidence is credible? How do we make those decisions?”

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Evan Ratliff, a co-host of the Longform Podcast, is host of the new podcast Persona: The French Deception.

“One of these big scams is like a story. And in the story, what they're doing is they're manipulating you to be a participant in the story, and they're getting you so hooked that you will not just do anything they say, but you will invest yourself in bringing the story to its conclusion. And like, isn't that what you're doing if you're trying to get someone to listen to eight episodes, spend that much of their life listening to your voice? … The idea that every story has this person pulling the strings... I like revisiting that in everything that I do."

Joe Sexton is a senior editor at ProPublica and a former reporter and editor at the New York Times, where he led the team that produced "Snow Fall."

"My experience in a newspaper newsroom over the years has been: The word you hear least often, the word that's hardest for people to say in that environment, is the word yes. It's safer to say no. You get second-guessed less often if you say no. Your job's not on the line if you say no. But if you're willing to say yes and you're willing to face the consequences of having said yes, then quite amazing things can happen."

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Radhika Jones is the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and the editor of Women on Women.

“There are a lot of people who still see the value of talking to someone, having a real conversation — about the things that they’re doing, the things that they’re caring about, the things that they’re afraid of, the things that are challenging — because in that conversation, they themselves will discover things that they didn’t realize. It obviously takes courage. It’s a payoff for the reader, certainly, but I think that there are subjects who understand that there is something there for them, too.”

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Melissa del Bosque is an investigative journalist covering the U.S.-Mexico border.

“What I really want people to know is the context within which this traumatic event is happening. It doesn’t have to happen. It’s happening because certain people made certain decisions. Or they made a decision to do nothing. … There are laws, there are policies on the books that are either being ignored or could be changed.”

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Azam Ahmed is an international investigative correspondent for The New York Times. His new book is Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother's Quest for Vengeance.

“I think the fundamental question I always ask when I go into a new place, whether I’m covering currencies, or hedge funds, or geopolitics in Afghanistan, or the war—it’s what does this mean to the world right now? What does the world need to know and how does it fit into that space?”

Jon Caramanica is a music critic at The New York Times.

“I like to interview people very early in their careers or very late in their careers. I think vulnerability and willingness to be vulnerable is at a peak in those two parts. Young enough not to know better, old enough not to give a damn. … The story I want to tell is—how are you this person, and then you became this? Then at the end, let’s look back on these things and let’s paint the art together. But in the middle when your primary obsession is how do I protect my role? How do I keep my spot? How do I keep the throne? I’m not as interested in that personally as a journalist or as a critic. ”

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Luke Mogelson is a journalist and fiction writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and other publications. His latest feature is ”Among the Insurrectionists.”

“Get to the front and document as much as you can. ... I think my approach is much more similar to photographers than other writers. I spend a lot of time with photographers and ... I feel like I've gotten pretty good at getting myself into situations where there's few or maybe no other writers around, but there's always a bunch of photographers…. I try to get in right behind the first photographers.”

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Alexey Kovalev is a Moscow-based journalist and the author of the recent article, “A Message to My Doomed Colleagues in the American Media."

“It’s really disheartening to see how little it takes for people to start believing in something that directly contradicts the empirical facts that they are directly confronting. The Russian TV channel tells you that the pill is red, but the pill in front of you is blue. It completely alters the perception of reality. You don’t know what’s real anymore.”

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Patrick Symmes is a foreign correspondent and contributor to Outside and Harper's.

"They rolled us up like a cheap carpet. We were locked in a room for 14 hours. And for the first six hours that was okay. Everything was nice; there was coffee. But then the nightshift came on. You could hear gunshots in the street, and these guys were scared. And they were thugs. And they were thugs with a mission: to get rid of every foreigner who might witness what was happening."</i>

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Sarah Maslin Nir, a reporter for The New York Times, recently published an exposé of labor practices in the nail salons of New York.

“The idea of a discount luxury is an oxymoron. And it’s an oxymoron for a reason: because someone is bearing the cost of that discount. In nail salons it’s always the person doing your nails, my investigation found. That has put a new lens on the world for me.”

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Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of The Skies Belong to Us.

"It was this big review in The New York Times and I was terrified that it was going to say something awful about the book or about me as a writer. And my son said to me — he's 5, I should say — "If it's bad, you won't die." That's a good point, you know? So I always think of that when I pick up a new review and take that risk of someone slamming something that I've genuinely poured my heart and soul into. You'll live to fight another day."

Thanks to TinyLetter and the The Literary Reportage concentration at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute for sponsoring this week's episode.

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Latria Graham is a writer living in South Carolina. Her work has appeared in Outside, Garden & Gun, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Her latest essay is "Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream."

“My goal as a person—not just as a writer—is to be the adult that I needed when I was younger. That’s why I go and talk to college classes. That’s why I write some of these vulnerable things, to let people that are struggling know that they’re not on their own. … I have to be unmerciful to myself, I think, in order to do it. I really do try to dissect myself and my mistakes. And just kind of say, Here’s the full deck of my life. Take from it what you need. But I’m not holding out on you.”

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Katie Engelhart is a journalist and the author of the new book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die.

“Billions of dollars of government money goes to the nursing home industry every year. And nobody has a nursing home correspondent. Nobody has an assisted living correspondent…. That's wild to me. As a journalist, someone tells me, Oh, there's an industry. It's hugely underregulated. It's getting billions of dollars a year. It is not super-accountable for that money. Who wouldn't want to cover that?”

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Lori Gottlieb is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Her new book is Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

“Everything that I had done all coalesced into one thing. As a journalist i was helping people to tell their stories, as a therapist I could help people to edit their stories, to change their stories. I could be immersed in the human condition in both of these things.”

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Mishka Shubaly is the author of I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You and several best-selling Kindle Singles.

“I remember thinking when I was shipwrecked in the Bahamas, ‘I’m going to fucking die here. I’m 24 years old, I’m going to die, and no one will miss me. I’m never going to see my mother again.’ And then the guy with the boat came around the corner and my first thought was ‘Man, this is going to be one hell of a story.’”

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