Vanessa Grigoriadis is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and New York.

On the art of the celebrity interview: "People are smart. Particularly these people. They're sitting there thinking, 'When is she going to drop that question?' They know what you're doing. So the way I think about it is: let's have an actual, genuine, human, interesting conversation. ... [Journalists] have all sorts of schemes of what they think works for them. My scheme is no scheme."

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Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and author of an upcoming book on people and wild animals.

"If I just kind of assume it's going to work out one way or another, it can be a real fun adventure to find the path from here to there. You know, hopefully just as you do more, that excitement starts to outweigh the horror of messing up."

Kiera Feldman is an investigative reporter. Her latest article is "Trashed: Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection."

"I used to have a lot of anxiety that I don’t seem like an investigative reporter. Utlimately, my reporting personality is just me. It’s just, I want to be real with people. And the number one rule of reporting is to be a human being to other people. Be decent. Be kind."

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Nicholas Quah founded and writes Hot Pod, a newsletter about the podcasting industry, and reviews podcasts for Vulture.

“I think to some extent I’m in love with the concept of momentum. Sheer velocity. It’s painful. It’s punishing. Physically, I’m worse off for it. But I feel like if I stop moving, something will fall. Something will break. And I’m over. It’s a horrible feeling.”

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Amy Chozick is an author, journalist, executive producer, and showrunner. Her latest feature for The New York Times is ”Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth.”

“The subject thought it was a hit job. Twitter thought it was a puff piece. I don’t know, guys. … I want to explain to people what it feels like to be around someone who you know you shouldn’t believe, but you can’t help believing them because this is what their personality is like when you’re with them.”

Jeff Goodell is a climate change writer for Rolling Stone and the author of seven books. His new book is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

“I would not have said this even five years ago, but I have really come to see this now as a crime story. This is a kind of looting of the atmosphere of the earth, siphoning off resources and grossly profiting off of that at the expense of many other people—billions of people—on this planet. And I understand that’s a big thing to say, but I think it’s just pretty obviously true. … I don’t mean that personally that each one of them personally is a criminal. We are all complicit in this.”

Jeanne Marie Laskas is the author of the new book Hidden America and a correspondent for GQ.

"I'm just a writer going into [people's lives], you know? What do you do with that kind of intensity of a relationship when you're job is to invoke it on the page? It's a huge ... not just privilege but responsibility. Because, you know, it's just for a story. And I tell them that: 'I'm asking you trust me, but at the same time don't trust me. I'm kind of like a vulture in this relationship—we're not friends.'"

Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang are reporters for the New York Times. They are coauthors of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination.

“There are two types of reporters. There are reporters who date and reporters who marry. I think both Cecilia and I are reporters who marry our sources and by that I mean they are lifelong sources. It’s not a relationship that you build quickly. It’s one where you have to really let them get to know you as a journalist, show them that you are always going to be honest and do what you say and protect their anonymity and that you’re not biased. I think some reporters make mistakes in that they try to curry favor with sources by writing things they think the sources will like and I think sources actually respect you more when you show them: no I am accurate and I am honest and I am objective and I’m actually going to check what you tell me so that I know it’s true and you know I am doing my homework on everything.”

Alzo Slade is a correspondent for VICE News and host of the podcast Cheat.

“Human beings, we are the same, right? Like when you come out of the womb, you need to eat, you need to sleep, you need to pee, you need to shit, and when it comes to emotional needs, you need to feel loved. You need to feel there's compassion, you know? You need to feel significant and of value. And when it comes to like the feeling of significance and feeling valued, I think that's where we start to get into trouble because the same things that you hold of value, I may not in the same way. […] And so if I can engage you and recognize the perspective from which you come, and at least give you an entry level or a human level of respect from the beginning, then the departure point for our engagement is a proper one, as opposed to an antagonistic one.”

Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a former war correspondent and host of NPR’s Weekend Edition. Her new podcast, for the New York Times, is First Person.

“I would always say that if you go cover a story and you already know what people are going to say, and you already have it in your head what the outcome is, and there's no surprise there, then that's a story that you shouldn't be working on. You have to allow the opportunity for there to be a journey. And for there to be something at the end of it, that is gonna be like, Wow. I really never thought that. I didn't think that I was coming here to report on that, but I guess that's what I'm here to report on.”

Mary Childs is a co-host of the podcast Planet Money and the author of The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All.

“I love aberrations. I love when things go wrong. You get a high stress situation, you get all of the manifestations of personality. We're our most selves, if not our best selves, at those times. I like the [stories] that have embedded in them all of those conduits of power and that reveal the greater system.”

Jeff Sharlet writes about politics and religion for Esquire, GQ, New York Times Magazine, and more.

“I like the stories with difficult people. I like the stories about people who are dismissed as monsters. I hate the term ‘monster.’ ‘Monster’ is a safe term for us, right? Trump’s a monster. Great, we don’t need to wrestle with, ‘Uh oh, he’s not a monster. He’s in this human family with us.’ I’m not normalizing him. I’m acknowledging the fact. Now, what’s wrong with us? If Trump is human, what’s wrong with you?”

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Michael J. Mooney is a staff writer at D Magazine and the author of The Life and Legend of Chris Kyle.

“There are some elements of crime stories that are so absurd that it’s funny, and so working on the “How Not to Get Away With Murder” story, it was actually really funny thinking about it for a long time. Until I met Nancy Howard, the woman who was shot in the face and has one eye now. This is her entire life, and it was destroyed. This is not a crime story to her, it’s her life.”

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David Epstein has reported for ProPublica, Sports Illustrated, and This American Life. His new book is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

“You can’t just introspect or take a personality quiz and know what you’re good at or interested in. You actually have to try stuff and then reflect on it. That’s how you learn about yourself—otherwise, your insight into yourself is constrained by your roster of experiences.”

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Daisy Alioto is a journalist and the CEO of Dirt Media.

“I don't think I was ever super precious about my writing, but if I was, I'm zero percent precious about it now. Every time I write for Dirt, it saves the company money. ... Nothing will make you sit down and write 800 words in 20 minutes than just needing to get it done. And that is a change that I've seen in myself. I would encourage everyone to be less precious about their writing.”

John Heilemann is the managing editor of Bloomberg Politics and the co-author of Game Change and Double Down.

"If you're a writer, and you're not an asshole, you want the maximum number of people to read your stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. There's no great glory in cultivating some niche audience. I do this work because I believe in what I'm doing. I'm not trying to compromise my principles or my standards to get a larger audience. But once I've written the thing of which I feel confident and proud, which I feel is ethically and journalistically sound, I then want the maximum number of people to read it."

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Jennifer Senior is a contributing editor at New York and the author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

"I've had moments in motherhood that have been close to something like religious. But I don't think social scientists say things like, "How many numinous moments have you had?" They don't do that, so you have to figure out what to do. I was suddenly turning to other texts to try and explain all of this."

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David Gessner is the author of ten books. His latest is Ultimate Glory: Frisbee, Obsession, and My Wild Youth.

“The ambition got in my way at first. Because I wanted my stuff to be great, and it froze me up. But later on it was really helpful. I’m startled by the way people don’t, you know, admit [they care] … it seems unlikely people wouldn’t want to be immortal.”

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PJ Vogt is the co-host of Reply All.

“Every radio story is broken. Everything is missing some piece it’s supposed to have. Everything has some weird interview that didn’t go the way you thought it was going to go, or you thought you had an answer but you were wrong.”

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Ben Austen is a journalist and the author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Together they host the podcast Some of My Best Friends Are.

”We're not pretending to have all the answers, but we are attempting to say, ‘this is a real issue and it can't be covered up by simply ignoring it.’ And if you can see it for what it is and all of its full dimensions, you have a better shot at bringing people along to get the work done to fix it.”

Sam Anderson is a writer for New York Times Magazine and the author of Boom Town.

“I love being in that place where everything is just coming in, and everything is potentially important, and I’m underlining every great sentence that John McPhee has ever written and then I’m typing it up into this embarrassingly long set of reading notes, documents, organized by books. And then when you sit down with it as a writer who has a job, and his job is to fill a little window of a magazine or website, all of that ecstatic inhaling has to stop. You realize that you’ve collected approximately 900,000% of what you need or could ever use.”

Julia Turner is editor-in-chief of Slate.

“That’s what we’ve been focused on: trying to double down on the stuff that feels distinctive and original. Because if you spend all your time on a social platform, and a bunch of media brands are optimizing all their content for that social platform, all those media brands’ headlines say the same, all the content is pretty interchangeable. It turns media into this commodity where then what is the point of developing a media company for 20 years? You might as well take the Silicon Valley approach and just make a new one every three years for whatever that moment is.”

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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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Starlee Kine is a contributor to This American Life and the New York Times Magazine.

"There's a fearlessness I had when I was younger that I don't have now ... It threw me into a crisis, the Internet in general. You're more cautious about what you kind of have out there. There's that, that I just don't want people to know every single thing anymore, but there's [also] an inner fear that did not exist before, an inner censoring that was not there."

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