Tavi Gevinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rookie.

"I just want our readers to know that they are already smart enough and cool enough."

Thanks to this week's sponsors, TinyLetter and Atavist Books.

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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Ian Coss is a journalist, audio producer, and composer. He is the host of Forever is a Long Time and The Big Dig.

“One thing that I really carried with me in making the show is a belief that bureaucracy is interesting. And that once you get through the jargon and wonky sounding stuff … beyond that it’s all just human drama.”

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 Barbaro is the host of The Daily.

“I don’t think The Daily should ever be my therapy session. That’s not what it’s meant to be, but I’m a human being. I arrive at work on a random Tuesday, and I do an interview with a guy like that, and it just punched me right in the stomach.”

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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.”

Tessa Hulls is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and The Capitol Hill Times. Her new book, a graphic memoir, is Feeding Ghosts.

“This project is the thing I have spent my entire life running from. I was incredibly determined to never touch this, either personally or professionally. … It was more an eventual act of resignation than a desire.”

Matthew Klam is a journalist and fiction writer. His new novel is Who Is Rich?.

“The New Yorker had hyped me with this “20 Under 40” thing…and when the tenth anniversary of that list [came], somebody wrote an article about it. And they found everybody in it, and I was the only one who hadn’t done anything since then, according to them. And the article, it was a little paragraph or two, it ended with ‘poor Matthew Klam.’”

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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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Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex & Money. Her new book is Let’s Talk About Hard Things.

“What hard conversations can do is—you can witness what's hard. You can be with what's hard. Admit what's hard. That can be its own relief. … Some hard conversations … are successful when they end in a place that's like, Oh, we're not going to agree on this. … I think you can get used to the feeling of feeling out of control and that makes them less scary.”

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Ben Smith is the media columnist for The New York Times. He was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.

“I do think there's some kind of personality flaw deep in there of wanting to like, you know, find stuff out and tell people.... I'm not sure that's a totally sane or healthy personality trait, but it is definitely, for me, a personality trait…. I think that in political reporting, certainly, there's a kind of reporter who thinks that their job is basically to pull the masks off of these monsters. And I generally tend to think all these people—with some exceptions—are weird and complicated and often doing really awful things. But they aren't necessarily irredeemable or impossible to understand. They're interesting.”

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.”

Paul Ford is a writer and programmer.

"You don't really read a newspaper to preserve journalism, or save great journalism, or to keep the newspaper going. You read it because it gives you a sense of power or control over the environment that you're in, and actually sort of helps you define what your personal territory is, and what the things are that matter for you. As long as products serve that need—as long as books allow you to explore spaces that it's otherwise really hard for you to explore and so on—I think people will continue to read them."