Sam Knight is a London-based staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is The Premonitions Bureau: A True Account of Death Foretold.

“I had a kind of working definition of what a premonition was when I was writing this book, which is: It's not just a feeling. It's not just a hunch. It's just not like a sense in the air. It's like, you know. You know, and you don't even want to know because you can't know and no one's going to believe you that you know, but you know. And what are you going to do about it? It's a horrible feeling.”

Gary Smith, a four-time National Magazine Award winner, retired last month after 32 years at Sports Illustrated.

"We were on the Santa Monica Freeway, Ali's driving 70 miles an hour and his eyes are drifting asleep—the medication for Parkinson's would do that to him. I'm thinking, 'Oh, crap.' We're weaving between lanes, cars are honking, and I'm wondering in the passenger seat, 'Should I grab the wheel from the greatest champ of all-time?' The writer in me wants to let it go, let the crash happen just so I get a scene for the story. But the human in me was just getting scared as hell."

Thanks to TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA WORLD CUP for sponsoring this week's episode.

Will Mackin is a U.S. Navy veteran who served with a SEAL team in Iraq and Afghanistan. His debut book is Bring Out the Dog.

“I wanted to write nonfiction and I started writing nonfiction. And the reason I did that was — first of all, I felt all the people did all the hard work, and who was I to take liberties? And the second reason was, I just felt an obligation to the men and women who I served with not to misrepresent them, or what they’d been through, or what it had meant to them, or how they felt about it. I kept piling these requirements on to myself: Well, if I present this particular event in this light, this guy’s going to get his feelings hurt. Or, I don’t know how this guy’s family will feel about me talking about this. And it became debilitating, all those restrictions, I kind of kept layering on myself. I was talking to George Saunders at one point about this, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this book is going to happen. I’m just stuck’ And he pointed out, ‘You’re putting all these restrictions on yourself because it puts this perfect book off in the never-to-reach future. If you remove those and start fictionalizing things and getting at it a different way, maybe it’ll work for you.’”

Thanks to MailChimp and Breach for sponsoring this week's episode.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is a New York-based writer. Her new book is Small Fry.

"You find yourself in a whole net, in a constellation of stories, each one connecting to another. It was amazing how much I remembered. Sometimes I meet people and they say, goodness, I can’t even remember what I had for lunch. How can you remember so much? And I think, oh, sit down for a while writing badly and you will remember and remember and remember. Some things weren’t terribly pleasant to remember. And some things were incredibly wonderful."

Thanks to MailChimp, Under My Skin, Skagen, Sleeping Beauty Dreams, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

May Jeong is a magazine writer and investigative reporter.

“I don’t have kids, I don’t have an expensive drug habit. Everything that I do right now at this moment in my life is to serve the story. That means that sometimes I’m not the best partner. I’m not the best friend. I’m a really terrible daughter probably. If my parents had a satisfaction survey, I don’t think I’d rank really high. I have friends who are buying houses and stuff. I’m very far away from that. What else have I sacrificed? I don’t know. Sometimes I let my body atrophy because I’m on the road all the time. I think I can do it for five more years. I’m 30, so things will have to change.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Read This Summer, Casper, and You Can't Make This Up for sponsoring this week's episode. Also: Longform Podcast t-shirts are still available!

Jad Abumrad is the co-creator and host of Radiolab. His latest podcast is Dolly Parton's America.

“There’s a way in which, I think, it felt more honest to be more confused in our stories. So that’s where we went.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Matthew Shaer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and The Atavist Magazine.

“I could not turn off the freelance switch in my head. I could not not be thinking about these different types of stories. My Google Alert list looks like a serial killer's.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, Howl, and MasterClass for sponsoring this week's episode.

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

"If I'm writing about the criminal justice system, I wish I were a lawyer. If I'm writing about psychiatry, I wish I were a psychiatrist. I have often filled out half my application to get a Ph.D in clinical psychology. That is one area where I am constantly on the verge of jumping the fence. But even when I wrote about religion, I thought I wanted to be a priest."

Thanks to TinyLetter and HostGator for sponsoring this week's episode.

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.”

Thanks to TinyLetter, Trunk Club, and Casper, for sponsoring this week's episode.

Joe Weisenthal is the executive editor of news for Bloomberg Digital and the co-host of What’d You Miss? and Odd Lots.

"If I don’t say yes to this, then I can never say yes to anything again. Because when else am I going to get a chance in life to co-host a tv show? Even if it’s terrible, and I’m terrible at it, and it’s cancelled after three months, and everyone thinks it’s awful, for the rest of my life, I’ll be able to say I co-hosted a cable TV show. And so I was like, you know what—I have to say yes to this."

Thanks to MailChimp, Big Questions, and Credible.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Empathy Exams, The Recovering, and the novel The Gin Closet. Her new essay collection is Make It Scream, Make It Burn.

“My writing is always basically asking: what does it feel like to be alive, and how do we ever try to understand what it feels like for anybody else to be alive? In that sense, on the intellectual level, I’m always going to keep chasing the same unanswerable things.”

Thanks to Mailchimp, Pitt Writers, Mythology for sponsoring this week's episode.

Rose Eveleth is the host of Flash Forward and the author of Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to Possible (and Not So Possible) Tomorrows.

“If I didn’t have that pretty bizarrely insatiable drive to do this stuff and understand things, I don’t know if I’d still be doing this. The curiosity index has to be high in order to make the rest of it worth it. Because otherwise, what’s the point?”

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Abe Streep is a journalist and contributing editor for Outside. His new book is Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana.

”The way journalists talk about, ‘Did you get the story?’—that's not how I see this. That would be extractive in this setting, I think. If someone shares something personal with me, that is a serious matter. It's a gift and you’ve got to treat it with great respect.”

Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept.

"My form of advocacy against the death penalty, frankly, has always been to tell those stories that other people aren’t seeing. And to humanize the people—not just the people facing execution, but everyone around them."

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, and Tripping.com for sponsoring this week's episode.

Connie Walker is an investigative reporter and podcast host. Her new show is Stolen: The Search for Jermain.

“For so long, there has been this kind of history of journalists coming in and taking stories from Indigenous communities. And that kind of extractive, transactional kind of journalism really causes a lot of harm. And so much of our work is trying to undo and address that. There is a way to be a storyteller and help amplify and give people agency in their stories.”

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

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.”

Thanks to Casper, Scribd, and TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

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.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Bombas, Harry's, and Trunk Club for sponsoring this week's episode.

McKay Coppins is a senior political writer for Buzzfeed News and the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

“I am part of the problem. Not in the sense that it’s my fault Trump ran, but in the sense that I’m one of many who for his entire life have mocked him and ridiculed him. He’s a billionaire—I don’t feel any moral guilt about it. But if being I’m honest with myself that same part of me can also, when not checked, be projected onto vast swathes of people. It’s easy to have a lazy classism about the type of people who would vote for Donald Trump.”

Thanks to MailChimp and Blue Apron for sponsoring this episode.

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.”

Thanks to TinyLetter, Squarespace and Lynda for sponsoring this week's episode. If you would like to support the show, please leave a review on iTunes.