John Jeremiah Sullivan is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and has written for Harper's, The New Yorker, and GQ. He is the author of Pulphead and the forthcoming The Prime Minister of Paradise: The True Story of a Lost American History.

“I love making pieces of writing and trying to find the right language to say what I mean. It's such a wonderful way of being alive in the world. I mean, your material is all around you. ... I'm lucky that it has stayed interesting for me. It hasn't faded. The challenges of writing, they still glow.”

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.'"

Lena Dunham, the creator and star of HBO's Girls, is the co-founder of Lenny and the author of Not That Kind of Girl. A special episode hosted by Longform Podcast editor Jenna Weiss-Berman.

“Writing across mediums can be a really healthy way to utilize your energy and stay productive while not feeling entrapped. But at the end of the day, the time when I feel like life is most just, like, flying by and I don't even know what's happening to me is when I'm writing prose. It's such an intimate relationship that you're having. When you're writing a script, you're making a blueprint for something that doesn't exist yet. But when you're writing prose, the thing exists immediately. And that's really satisfying. It's the best place to go for my deepest and most in-the-now concerns.”

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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."

Thanks to TinyLetter, EA SPORTS FIFA 14 and Learnvest for sponsoring this week's episode.

Dan P. Lee is a contributing writer at New York.

"I don't believe in answers. That's what compels me to write all of these stories. None of them ends nicely, none of them ends neatly."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

Kelly McEvers, a former war correspondent, hosts NPR's All Things Considered and the podcast Embedded.

“Listeners want you to be real, a real person. Somebody who stumbles and fails sometimes. I think the more human you are, the more people can then relate to you. The whole point is not so everybody likes me, but it’s so people will want to take my hand and come along. It's so they feel like they trust me enough to come down the road with me. To do that, I feel like you need to be honest and transparent about what that road’s like.”

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Ellis Jones is the editor-in-chief of VICE Magazine.

“I’m just not an edgy person. You know what I mean? I think I am a nice person. I think VICE Magazine reflects the qualities that I want to have or think that I have or that my team has. The magazine would be terrible if I tried to make edgy content ... people would just see right through it. It wouldn’t be good.”

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Rachel Monroe is a freelance writer based in Texas.

“I will totally go emotionally deep with people. If I can find a subject who is into that then it will probably be a good story. Whether that person is a victim of a crime, or a committer of a crime, or a woman who spends a lot of time on the internet looking for hoaxes, or whatever it may be—I guess I just think people are interesting. Particularly when those people have gone through some sort of extreme situation.”

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Sarah Menkedick is a freelance writer and the founder of Vela. Her upcoming book is Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm.

“I’d been rejected a ton of times—I had that 400-page thing that never became a book. So there were plenty of epic rejections that felt catastrophic. And I’d sort of arrived at this point where I was like: I’m living in my parents' cabin, and I’m pregnant, so whatever. Fuck it. I’m gonna write whatever I want to write.”

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Hillary Frank is the creator of The Longest Shortest Time podcast and the author of Weird Parenting Wins.

“I think motherhood is not valued in our culture. We don’t value the work of mothers both at home and then at work. Mothers are the most discriminated against people at work. They’re discriminated more against than fathers or people without children. Mothers are promoted less, hired less, and paid less. People are forced out of their jobs after they announce that they’re pregnant, they’re passed over for promotions, and they get horrible, discriminatory comments like, ‘Oh, don’t you really think you want to be at home? Do you really want to come back?‘ And American work culture is not set up for people to be parents and mothers.”

Thanks to MailChimp, The Great Courses Plus, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

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.”

Matt Levine is a finance columnist for Bloomberg Opinion . His newsletter is Money Stuff.

”I write a lot about people who have gotten in trouble with the SEC or the Justice Department. And a surprising subset of them will email me. And often I will have made fun of them, and they'll be like, ‘That was pretty fair.’”

Ryan O’Hanlon is a soccer writer for ESPN. His new book is Net Gains: Inside the Beautiful Game’s Analytics Revolution.

“It wasn’t just that I was burned out from two years at The Ringer, it was being burned out from nine years of just freakin’ bobbing up and down to keep my head above water, and changing the water every year.”

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, author, and host of the podcasts Work Life and Re: Thinking. His new book is Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.

“If you only focus on your own interest, you tend to develop novel ideas, but not necessarily useful ideas. And so for me, the audience is a filter. … I might have 30 ideas for a book. Let me hone in on the four or five that also might be relevant to other people. The goal there is to make a contribution.”

Lauren Markham is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and VQR. Her new book is A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging.

“It took me a while to figure out that this is actually a book about storytelling, about journalistic storytelling, about the kind of myths we spin culturally and politically, about history, about current events, and the role of journalism within all of that, and my role as a journalist.”

Jennifer Gonnerman is a contributing editor at New York and contributing writer for Mother Jones.

"How much do we really interact with people who are different from ourselves? We go to work, we go home, we go to a party—I feel like this is a fantastic opportunity to meet peope who are totally and completely different, from totally different worlds, backgrounds, interests, countries. It's almost like a passport to a different world with every story. Once you make that trip and go into someone's home and really listen to them, empathy is not that hard to come by."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

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Keith Gessen is the founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker.

"The founding editors are slowing down. We're not mad at anyone anymore. We think everything is great. ... But amazingly at n+1, we've had this younger generation of angry young women kind of rise up. Something has created space for young editors to come in and be really angry ... But that's holy, that's the thing that makes great writing: being angry."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

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Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

"The categories are in motion. You turn into a Goliath, then you topple because of your bigness. You fall to the bottom again. And Davids, after a while, are no longer Davids. Facebook is no longer an underdog—it's now everything it once despised. I am everything I once despised. When I was 25, I used to write these incredibly snotty, hostile articles attacking big-name, nonfiction journalists. Now I read them and I'm like, 'Oh my God, they're doing a me on me!'"

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Anna Sale is the host of Death, Sex & Money.

“It's the result of listening, of feeling listened to, that people open up. I look like a crazy person when I do interviews, because sometimes someone will be describing something and I will close my eyes and try to picture what they’re telling me. And if I can’t picture the moment they’re describing I’ll just try to dig in a little bit more.”

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Andy Greenwald covers television for Grantland.

“People are enthusiastic about TV. People want to read about it. They want to talk about it. They want to know more. They want to extend its presence in their lives. People used to talk about the water cooler show, but the internet is that water cooler now and people want to be part of the conversation.”

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Susie Cagle is a journalist and illustrator.

“I don’t really know what it was that made me not quit. I still kind of wonder that. There have been many times over the last couple of years even, as things are taking off in my career, things are going well, I’m writing about wonderful things that are interesting to me, and I still wonder—should I be doing this? What the hell is next year gonna look like?”

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Wesley Yang writes for New York and other publications.

“If a person remains true to some part of their experience, no matter what it is, and they present it in full candor, there’s value to that. People will recognize it. Once I knew that was true, I knew I could do this.”

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Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is an essayist. Her 2017 GQ piece “A Most American Terrorist: The Making of Dylann Roof” won the National Magazine Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

“I remember feeling like ‘you’re playing chess with evil, and you gotta win.’ Because this is the most terrible thing I’d ever seen. And I was so mad. I still get so mad. Words aren’t enough. I’m angry about it. I can’t do anything to Dylann Roof, physically, so this is what I could do.”

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Mike Issac covers Silicon Valley for The New York Times. He is the author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

“People try to use journalists all the time. Your job as a journalist is to figure out who’s using you, why they’re using you, and whether you can do something legitimately without playing into one side or another.”

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Dean Baquet is executive editor of The New York Times.

"I always tried to question what is the difference between what is truly tradition and core, and what is merely habit. A lot of stuff we think are core, are just habits. The way we write newspaper stories, that’s not core, that’s habit. I think that’s the most important part about leading a place that’s going through dramatic change and even generational change. You’ve got to say, here’s what’s not going to change. This is core. This is who we are. Everything else is sort of up for grabs."

Thanks to Mailchimp and Apple Books for sponsoring this week's episode.