Sarah Marshall is a writer and hosts the podcast You're Wrong About.

”I love it when people tell me that listening to the way I talk about these people in the stories that we tell, and just about the world generally, has made them practice empathy more. I almost feel like I have preserved this a-little-bit-past version of myself, because I've been on this journey throughout the pandemic of becoming pretty cynical, and then deciding cynicism is a luxury and that it feels better, ultimately, to try to believe in people.”

Laurel Braitman is a science writer, the author of Animal Madness: Inside Their Minds, and the founder of Writing Medicine. Her new book is What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love.

“My life was becoming unmanageable, in a way. I was using success in many ways like a drug, and I’d say like an analgesic on the sorts of difficult feelings I hadn’t wanted to face truly since childhood. And we are rewarded in this culture for these kinds of outward forms of success that often have nothing to do with what’s going on inside of you.”

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster. Her new book is Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs.

“Comedy has been super helpful to me because it's so based on failing every night sometimes that I wasn't afraid of failure in the same way because it's just like, Well, that's going to happen to me at some point this week. Why not in this format?”

Michael Lewis has written for The New Republic, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is Flash Boys.

“When you're telling a story, you're essentially playing the cards you're dealt. ... Sometimes the hand is very easy to play. Sometimes the hand is difficult to play. At the end, I just try to think, ‘Is there anything I would have done differently?‘ ‘Is there any trick I missed?’ If I don't have the feeling that I missed something big, I feel happy about the book.”

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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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Naomi Zeichner is editor-in-chief of The Fader.

“Right now in rap there’s kind of a huge tired idea that kids are trying to kill their idols, and kids have no respect for history, and kids are making bastardized crazy music, and how dare they? I just don’t even know why we still care about this false dichotomy. Kids are coming from where they come from, they’re going where they’re going. And it’s like, do you want to try to learn about where they’re coming from and where they’re going, or do you not?”

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Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and the co-host of Still Processing. His latest article is "Last Taboo: Why Pop Culture Just Can’t Deal With Black Male Sexuality."

“You learn a lot of things about your sexuality at an early age. You know, I learned that your penis is a problem for white people, that you can’t be too openly sexual in general because that could get you in trouble because someone could misconstrue what you’re doing, and, in my case, I also knew I was gay. So I had to deal with, ‘Ok so my dick is a problem in general, and I’m not even interested in putting my penis where it’s supposed to go. This is going to be bad.’”

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Ana Marie Cox is the senior political correspondent for MTV News, conducts the “Talk” interviews in The New York Times Magazine, and founded Wonkette.

“When people are sending me hate mail or threats, one defense I have against that is ‘you don’t know me.’ You know? That wasn’t something I always was able to say. As I’ve become a stronger person, it’s been easier for me to be like, ‘The person they’re attacking, it’s not me.’”

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Erin Lee Carr is a documentary filmmaker and writer. Her new film is Mommy Dead and Dearest.

“I feel like I’ve always had the story down—that’s not been really difficult for me. So the difficult thing, I think, for me, has always been access. Can I get the access? Can I withstand the pressure? You know, there’s been so many times where I wasn’t being paid to do the job, and I had to wait on the access. And it’s not for the faint of heart. You know, I could have spent a year and a half of my life doing [Mommy Dead and Dearest] and I could’ve not gotten the access to Gypsy, and it kind of would’ve been a wash.”

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Elif Batuman is a novelist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest article is “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry.”

“I hear novelists say things sometimes like the character does something they don’t expect. It’s like talking to people who have done ayahuasca or belong to some cult. That’s how I felt about it until extremely recently. All of these people have drunk some kind of Kool Aid where they’re like, ‘I’m in this trippy zone where characters are doing things.’ And I would think to myself, if they were men—Wow, this person has devised this really ingenious way to avoid self-knowledge. If they were women, I would think—Wow, this woman has found an ingenious way to become complicit in her own bullying and silencing. It’s only kind of recently—and with a lot of therapy actually—that I’ve come to see that there is a mode of fiction that I can imagine participating in where, once I’ve freed myself of a certain amount of stuff I feel like I have to write about, which has gotten quite large by this point, it would be fun to make things up and play around.”

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Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and has been reporting from Ukraine for the last several weeks. His most recent article is "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine."

“I’m not at all a conflict reporter. I don't like it, though who would like being in these situations? But this is the story, right? If you cover this part of the world, if the war in 2014 felt like the tectonic plates of history were shifting, now they're just erupting, crashing. This is the asteroid-impact event for this part of the world with effects that will last similarly long going forward.”