Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and co-author of the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane.

“It's a version of myself. It's a hyperbolic version of myself. And I think it keeps it fun for me. It doesn't feel like a job. Ideally, it keeps it fun for readers. And I think that there actually is this function where X out of 10 people coming to it, their eyes are going to cross and they're going say, I'm out. No thanks. And that's fine, because the Y out of 10 who stick around feel that much more in on something and it just makes it feel like a funky, special place.”

Derek Thompson is a staff writer for The Atlantic and host of the podcast Plain English.

“I am an inveterate dilettante. I lose interest in subjects all the time. Because what I find interesting about my job is the invitation to solve mysteries. And once you solve one, two, three mysteries in a space, then the meta-mystery of that space begins to dim. And all these other subjects—that's the new unlit space that needs the flashlight. And that's the part of the job that I love the most: that there are so many dark corners in the world. And I've just got this flashlight, and I can just shine it wherever the hell I want.”

Jesse Coburn is an investigative reporter at Streetsblog. He won the Polk Award for Local Reporting for "Ghost Tags," his series on the black market for temporary license plates.

“You can imagine this having never become a problem, because it’s so weird. What a weird scam. I’m going to print and sell tens of thousands of paper license plates. But someone figured it out. And then a lot more people followed. It just exploded.”

This is the second in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

Al Baker is a crime reporter at The New York Times, where he writes the series “Murder in the 4-0.”

“When there’s a murder in a public housing high rise, there’s a body on the floor. Jessica White in a playground, on a hot summer night. Her children saw it. Her body fell by a bench by a slide. You look up and there’s hundreds of windows, representing potentially thousands of eyes, looking down on that like a fishbowl. …They’re seeing it through the window and they can see that there’s a scarcity of response. And then they measure that against the police shooting that happened in February when there were three helicopters in the air and spotlights shining down on them all night and hundreds of officers with heavy armor going door to door to door to find out who shot a police officer. They can see the difference between a civilian death and an officer death.”

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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.'"

Joshua Davis is a contributing editor at Wired and author of the new ebook John McAfee's Last Stand.

"This is a pretty unique situation [for me]. Never has a multimillionaire tech pioneer gone on the lam for a murder and called me from hiding. Yeah, this is a first."

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Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host of A Slight Change of Plans.

”I am a type A person through and through. I love having the five-year plan and the ten-year plan, and mapping it all out. By nature, that's what I'm like. And I think the series of pivots that my life has naturally taken, or I've had to take, has kind of soured me on that whole way of thinking. […] Maybe it's also that I'm a more grateful person than I used to be. Like, I feel more gratitude, and so part of my orientation now is, well, how lucky am I that I even stumbled upon something?”

Erika Hayasaki has written for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and The Atlantic. Her new book is Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family.

“I don’t subscribe to the belief that it’s our story because we’re the journalist that wrote it — especially when people are sharing these really intimate, deep, painful moments. That is not my story. That’s their story that they've collaborated in a way with me to share through these interviews.”

Kevin Kelly is one of the founding editors of Wired, where his current title is Senior Maverick. His new book is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I'd Known Earlier.

“I never wrote a book because I wanted to do a good deed. I just wanted to tell a good story.”

Carl Zimmer, a columnist for the New York Times and a national correspondent at STAT, writes about science.

“[Criticism] doesn’t change the truth. You know? Global warming is still happening. Vaccines still work. Evolution is still true. No matter what someone on Twitter or someone in an administration is going to say, it’s still true. So, we science writers have to still be letting people know about what science has discovered, what we with our minds have discovered about the world—to the best of our abilities. That’s our duty as science writers, and we can’t let these things scare us off.”

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Emily Nussbaum is a television critic at The New Yorker.

"I actually feel this kind of crazy cause ... because TV is condescended to, has been put down and treated like it's junk, and TV deserves to have the kind of criticism that expects it to be great. To me it's a really engaging and satisfying cause, no matter whether I'm praising or criticizing something."</i>

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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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Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. His latest book is Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.

"In the end, I don’t care how famous you get, how widely read you are during your lifetime. You’re going to be forgotten. And you’re going to have five or six fans in the end. It’s going to be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are going to say, Oh, yeah, he was big. … So I think the key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you’re only doing this for yourself. … So maybe do your best stuff for yourself and for the three, four, five people who know in the coming century that you ever existed. That’s all you need to do."

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Brittany Luse is the host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute.

“One of the things I love about this job is everything is practice. I love it. It's like if a show is great and everyone loves it, you gotta put on another one. You just gotta do it again. And if the show didn't quite do what you'd hoped or set out to do in your mind and in your heart, you gotta do another one. I just love it. You can never feel too good and you can never feel too bad.”

Evan Wright, a two-time National Magazine Award winner, is the author of Generation Kill.

"When people were killed, civilians especially, I realized I was the only person there who would write it down. I was frantic about getting names, and in the book there are a few Arabic names, some of the victims. Not that anyone cares. But I thought, 'At least somewhere there's a record of this.'"

Thanks to this week’s sponsors: TinyLetter and HostGator.

Pamela Colloff is an executive editor and staff writer at Texas Monthly.

"That sense of loss, that sense of normal life turning on a dime is something that, in a very different way, I’ve experienced. And I carry that with me into some of the more difficult stories."

Mimi Swartz has written for Talk, The New Yorker and Vogue. She is an executive editor at Texas Monthly.

"Here’s this great [public interest] story that nobody’s ever told. Now how can I write it so the maximum number of people want to read it? I try to make the homework part as interesting and compelling as possible."

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Josh Dean has written for GQ, Fast Company, New York, and more. His latest piece, "The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang," was just published by The Atavist.

“I sort of reject the whole idea of something being beneath me. There are obviously some stories I wouldn’t do or that I have no interest in, but this job is fun and should be fun. And I wouldn’t turn something down that seems like a fun thing for me to do just because maybe the story is not something that 10,000 people are going to tweet about. I don’t give a shit.”

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

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books. Her latest is Motherhood: A Novel.

“[My parents] were afraid for me. As anybody who has a kid who wants to be a writer. I think they understood it was a hard life. It was a life in which you wouldn’t necessarily make enough money. It was a life in which you might be setting yourself up for a great amount of disappointment. My dad’s father was a painter, so there was in him this idea that it wasn’t so crazy to him. It wasn’t so outside his understanding. And, yeah, my mom thought it was a bad idea. And it probably is a bad idea in a lot of ways, but my dad was supportive but also cautioning. I think the book really moved [my mom] and really had an effect on her, so maybe you understand that it’s not necessarily a frivolous thing to be doing. Maybe it’s not just playing. I think my mom always had this idea that writing is playing, and it is playing, but it’s a serious kind of playing.”

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Reeves Wiedeman is a reporter at New York.

“I think the main reason I love the job is reporting. And the fact that you get to go out into situations that you wouldn’t otherwise as your job. I’m someone who gets antsy if I’m just on a vacation sitting around. I’d much rather go somewhere weird and kind of have a purpose. So, just feeling like you can kind of go anywhere and see anything and talk to anyone is a pretty cool way to live your day.”

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