Robert McKee is an author and screenwriting lecturer. His new book is Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen.

”When I'm in conversation with others, I'm always aware—or sensitive, at least—to what they're really thinking and feeling. And writers must have that. They can't possibly create excellent nonfiction or fiction if they're not aware of what is going on inside of other people, really, even subconsciously, while they go about saying whatever they do consciously in the world. Because if you just recorded the surface, if you were just paying attention to the surface, you'd be missing the whole show.”

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Jessica Pressler writes for New York, Elle and GQ.

“I really like hustlers, stories about someone who comes out of nowhere and tries to do it for themselves. Those people are just easy to like. Even when they're sort of terrible, they're easy to like.”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic and author of The Beautiful Struggle.

"I was 24 when my son was born. People always say that kids get in the way, right? But actually it had the opposite effect on me. I feel like I could have spent my twenties doing all sorts of self-destructive things--that was my natural inclination--but having a kid suddenly makes that not OK ... The stakes of everything just went up. I think I'm the type of person where, for any reason, I only respond to pressure. That kid just so raised the pressure, for everything ... So I started writing for the Washington Monthly, and the Monthly pays shit, everybody knows that, right? They were paying ten cents a word at this point. But because they have these big-shots writing for them, nobody ever calls for the check! But I would say, 'no, I need you to send me that check. Yeah, I know it's only $150, but I actually need that check, you really need to send that check.'"

Brooke Gladstone is the host of On the Media and the author of The Influencing Machine.

“I'm not going to get any richer or more famous than I am right now. This is it, this is fine — it's better than I ever expected. I don't have anything to risk anymore. As far as I’m concerned, I want to just spend this last decade, decade and a half, twenty years, doing what I think is valuable. I don’t have any career path anymore. I’m totally off the career path. The beautiful thing is that I just don’t have any more fucks to give.”

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Jon Ronson, a contributor to This American Life, The Guardian and GQ, is the author of six books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest is Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries.

"The older you get, you realize that no uncomfortable fact makes your story worse. Contradictions are great. What's bad, what to me is the worst journalistic sin, is ridiculous polemicism. ... To me, the contradictions, the story not turning out the way you want—you have to be a twig in the tidal wave of the story."

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Masha Gessen has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and others. Her book about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, came out in April.

“The moment she said it, it was obvious that I'd been created to write this story. I'd covered both wars in Chechnya. I'd covered a lot of terrorism. I'd studied terrorism. And I'd been a Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston, which actually is the most important qualification for writing this book. It didn't give me special knowledge, but it gave me a lot of questions that I knew to ask that other people wouldn't.”

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Brooke Gladstone is the host of On the Media.

“I’ve learned so much about how easy it is to redefine reality in this era of billions of filter bubbles. How easy it is to cast doubt on what is undeniably true. And I think that that’s what frightens me the most. I actually think that’s what frightens most people the most. How do we make sure that we all live in the same world? Or do we?”

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Nitasha Tiku is a senior writer at Wired.

“I’ve always been an incredibly nosy person—not nosy, curious. Curious about the world. It just gives you a license to ask any question, and hopefully if you have a willing editor, the freedom to see something fascinating and pursue it. It was just a natural fit from there. But that also means I don’t have the machismo, ‘breaking news’ sort of a thing. I feel like I can try on different hats, wherever I am.”

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Max Chafkin is a features editor and reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book is The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.

“I think there's like a really good way to come up with story ideas where you basically just look for people who have given TED Talks and figure out what they're lying about. And there's also a tendency in the press to pump up these startups based on those stories. ... It's worth taking a critical look at these stars of the moment. Because often there's not as much there as we think. And if you’re talking about Theranos or something, there's some potential to do harm—but also it means that maybe more worthwhile efforts are not getting the attention they deserve.”

Vann Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of Floodlines: The Story of an Unnatural Disaster. His new podcast is Holy Week: The Story of a Revolution Undone.

“I’m often toggling between environmental justice, between the history of race and racial organization in America. And to me, they’re all one story, and I’m trying to tell the story about how the conditions of marginalization in America have made and shaped the present. That’s it. That’s one story.”

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new book is Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.

“I used to feel that if I knew everything, that was a good sign. And I've become more aware that if you know everything you want to argue, that's not such a good sign…. Do I have a genuine question? Is there something I’m trying to figure out? Then the story is worth telling. But if I don’t really have a question or if my question is already answered, then maybe that should give you pause.”

Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, writes for The New York Times and is the editorial director of Fusion.

“I think that Jezebel contributed to what I now call ‘outrage culture,’ but outrage culture has no sense of humor. We had a hell of a sense of humor, that's where it splits off. ... The fact that people who are incredibly intelligent and have interesting things to say aren't given the room to work out their arguments or thoughts because someone will take offense is depressing to me.”

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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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Linda Villarosa directs the journalism program at the City College of New York and is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. Her article "Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis" was one of Longform's Top Ten of 2018. She is at work on a new book, Under the Skin: Race, Inequality and the Health of a Nation, due out in 2020.

“I think at the beginning I was afraid to say it right out, so I think I was saying ‘racial bias’ or something like that. Then I stopped. ... I think how I learned about it both in earlier reporting and in grad school and in my own research was that race is a risk factor for a bunch of different health problems, whether it’s heart disease, infant and maternal mortality, or HIV. It’s just said that race is a risk factor. It’s disproportionate. What it really is is that race is a risk factor, but it’s also a risk marker. Instead of looking at what individuals are doing wrong, it’s what society is doing wrong in creating problems for individual people which lead to health crisis. It’s sort of like bias, related to racism, is creating problems in people’s actual bodies. That’s what I came to understand. It really shifts the blame off the individual.”

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Robin Marantz Henig, the author of nine books, writes about science and medicine for The New York Times Magazine.

“I have my moments of thinking, ‘Well, why is this still so hard? Why do I still have to prove myself after all this time?’ If I were in a different field, or if I were even on a staff, I’d have a title that gave me more respect. I still have to wait just as long as any other writer to get any kind of response to a pitch. I still have to pitch. Nothing is automatic, even after all these years of working at this.”

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Jodi Kantor is a New York Times investigative reporter and the author of The Obamas. On October 5th, she (with Megan Twohey) published an article detailing decades of sexual harassment payoffs by Harvey Weinstein, and she has covered the story extensively since.

“Being a reporter really robs you of self-consciousness and shyness. You realize that it’s this great gift of being able to ask crazy questions, either really personal or very probing or especially with a powerful — to walk up to Harvey Weinstein, essentially and say, ‘What have you been doing to women all these years, and for how long? All of these other people may be afraid to confront you about it, but we are not.’ That is our job.”

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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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Kliph Nesteroff writes for WFMU's Beware of the Blog. His book, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy, was released in November.

“Well, comedy always becomes stale. Whether it’s offensive or not offensive, it has an expiry date, unfortunately. A lot of people don’t want to hear this because that means a lot of their favorite comedians suddenly become irrelevant. But that’s the history of comedy: the hippest, coolest guy today—whoever that is to you in comedy—50 years from now, the new generation is going to say, ‘That guy’s not funny, and he’s square.’ And they’re going to say, ‘This new young guy is funny.’ But in another 50 years that guy becomes the square who isn’t funny. And it’s not that they weren’t funny and everybody was wrong; it was that that person was relating to their time.”

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Ben Taub is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

“I don’t think it’s my place to be cynical because I’ve observed some of the horrors of the Syrian War through these various materials, but it’s Syrians that are living them. It’s Syrians that are being largely ignored by the international community and by a lot of political attention on ISIS. And I think that it wouldn’t be my place to be cynical when some of them still aren’t.”

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Azmat Khan is an investigative reporter and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

"For me, what matters most is systematic investigation, and I think that’s different than an investigative story that might explore one case. It’s about stepping back and understanding the big picture and getting to the heart of something. It doesn’t have to be a number’s game, but being able to say: Look, I looked at a wide enough sample of whatever this issue is, and here is what this tells us. That is what I crave and love the most."

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Rebecca Traister writes for New York. Her new book is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.

“I don’t want my experience to be held up as so, ladies, your new health regimen is rage all day. Because the fact is we live in a world that does punish women for expressing their anger, that denies them jobs, that attaches to them bad reputations as difficult-to-work-with, crazy bitches. Because they’re reasonably angry about something they have every reason to be angry about. We live in a world in which black women’s anger is either caricatured and they get written off as cartoons, or regarded as threats and face steep, often physical penalties for expressing dissent or dissatisfaction. When I talk about this, I don’t mean it to be prescriptive, I mean it to be descriptive of a particular experience I had that was extraordinarily unusual but which made me question a premise that I think all of us internalize that the anger is bad for us. I no longer believe that that’s true.”

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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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Sheelah Kolhatkar is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.

“Suddenly the financial crisis happened and all this stuff that had been hidden from view came out into the open. It was like, ‘Oh, this was actually all kind of a big façade.’ And there was all this fraud and stealing and manipulation and corruption, and all these other things going on underneath the whole shiny rock star surface. And that really also demonstrated to people how connected business stories, or anything to do with money, are to everything else going on. I mean, really almost everything that happens in our world, if you trace it back to its source, it’s money at the root of it.”

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Michelle Dean is a journalist and critic. Her new book is Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion.

“There isn’t one answer. I wish there was one answer. The answer is: You just have to wing it. And I’m learning that — I’m learning to be okay with the winging it. ... I guess the lesson to me of what went on with a lot of women in the book is: You have to be comfortable with the fact that some days are going to be good, and some days are going to not be good.”

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Leah Finnegan, a former New York Times and Gawker editor, is the managing news editor at Genius.

“After the Condé Nast article, Nick Denton decided Gawker needed to be 20% nicer, and I took a buyout because I was not 20% nicer.”

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