Emily Oster is an economist, professor, and author. Her new book is The Family Firm.

”[COVID] has been 18 months of being a person who is slightly more public, who is saying things that are somewhat more controversial, where people yell at me a lot. ... I do much less reading of the comments than I did early on because I found that eventually I just got mad and that's not a productive way to interact. And it affects how I think about what I write, and I would like what I write to be the things that I think are true, not the things I think will avoid people being angry.”

Clint Smith is a poet and a staff writer for The Atlantic. His most recent book is How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America and his latest feature is “Monuments to the Unthinkable.”

“I've been to a lot of places that carry a history of death and slaughter and murder. I've been on plantations. I've been in execution chambers. I've sat on electric chairs. I've been on death row. But I have never experienced anything like what I experienced walking through the gas chamber in Dachau. I mean, there's reading books about the Holocaust, and then there's that. And that is something that I hope to continue doing for the rest of my life: putting my body where these things happen. Because it completely transforms your understanding of what it was like.”

Pablo Torre is a senior writer at ESPN the Magazine and frequently appears on Around the Horn, PTI, and other ESPN shows.

“Most of my friends are not sports fans. My parents aren't. Brother and sister — no. So I just want to make things that they want to read. That's the big litmus test for me in deciding if a story is worth investing my time into: Is somebody who doesn’t give a shit about sports gonna be interested in this?”

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Jake Halpern has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine and is a contributor to This American Life. His latest book is Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld.

"I test out my stories on my kids. You should be able to tell any story, now matter how complicated, to a seven-year-old in a way that they understand. If you can't, that probably means that either a) you're telling the story wrong or b) it's not really a story."

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Steve Kandell is the longform editor at BuzzFeed.

"What would be the sort of longer, narrative nonfiction, journalistic equivalent of something that would have the same effect on you as a bunch of cat GIFs? And not because it's cute, but it's the kind of thing that makes you go, 'OK, I need a lot of other people to see this.'"

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Carol Loomis retired last summer after 60 years at Fortune. She continues to edit Warren Buffett's annual report.

“Writing itself makes you realize where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I think until I see what I write. And so I believe that, even though you’re an optimist, the analysis part of you kicks in when you sit down to construct a story or a paragraph or a sentence. You think, ‘Oh, that can’t be right.’ And you have to go back, and you have to rethink it all.” 

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Rukmini Callimachi covers ISIS for The New York Times. Part 2 of this episode is available here.

“Nine out of 10 Americans said they were aware of James Foley's execution. That's a huge win for ISIS. That's what they want. I think they've realized that journalists are the crème de la crème as far as targets. And that's a really scary thing for our profession.”

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Hua Hsu writes for The New Yorker and is the author of A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific.

“I remember, as a kid, my dad telling me that when he moved to the United States he subscribed to The New Yorker, and then he canceled it after a month because he had no idea what any of it was about. You know, at the time, it certainly wasn’t a magazine for a Chinese immigrant fresh off the boat—or off the plane, rather—in the early 70s. And I always think about that. I always think, ‘I want my dad to understand even though he’s not that interested in Dr.Dre.’ I still think, ‘I want him to be able to glean something from this.’”

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Jeffrey Gettleman is the East Africa Bureau Chief for the New York Times and the author of Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival.

“I’m not an adventure-seeking adrenaline junky. I like to explore new worlds, but I’m not one of these chain-smoking, hard-drinking, partying types that just wants thrills all the time. And unfortunately that’s an aspect of the job. And as I get older and I’ve been through more and more, the question gets louder. Which is: Why do you keep doing this? Because you feel like you only have so many points, and eventually the points are going to run out.”

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Kiese Laymon is the author of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Heavy: An American Memoir.

“It’s ironic to me that my mom was the woman who taught me how to read. She was the black woman who taught me how to read and write. And everything I wrote outside of my house I was taught not to write to my mama. I just think that’s where we are as black writers and black creators in this country. Literally because most of our teachers are white. Principals are white. The standards are white. But I wanted to flip this on its head and I wanted to write this book to the person who taught me how to read and write. And, yeah, we got some dysfunctional, fucked-up shit going on. But we also have some abundant love shit going on, too.”

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Errol Morris is the director of The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War. His latest film is American Dharma.

“I don’t make films because it makes sense to make them. Probably if I thought carefully about whether they made sense, I would stop immediately. I make them because I have a need to do it. I have a need to think about stuff. Writing and filmmaking for me is a form of thinking. It’s an opportunity to think about something. And I enjoy it. I don’t know what I would do without filmmaking.”

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Raquel Willis, the former executive editor of Out, is an activist, journalist, and writer.

Guest host Patrice Peck is a freelance journalist and writes the Coronavirus News for Black Folks newsletter.

“To my peers, I would just say that we have to rethink our idea of leadership. Rethink our idea of storytelling. As the media, we shouldn’t be seeing ourselves as the owners and the gatekeepers of people’s stories. We actually need to be democratizing this experience—sharing the tools of storytelling with other folks. Folks are hungry to tell their own stories and may not always have the tools.”

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Elizabeth Weil covers California and the climate for ProPublica. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, California Sunday, and more.

“As a journalist you’re endlessly asking people to tell you really personal, really vulnerable stuff about their lives. And I feel like you have to be willing to be in that conversation too—or really think about why you’re not willing.”

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Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and critic whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. His new book is A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance.

“I learn from hearing my elders tell stories. There’s an inherent knowing of yourself as a vessel for narration who also has to—is required to—hold the attention of others at all costs. And that’s essentially what I’m trying to do. The broader project of my writing is almost a constant pleading of: Don’t leave yet. Stay here with me for just a little bit longer.”

Eric Lach is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he covers New York. His latest article is “The Mayor and the Con Man.”

“I think about my own trajectory, my little generation of journalists—it was easier to get jobs reporting on national politics than to get a job reporting on something that you could see and go to and that is a really strange thing, the relief and the joy that I feel like when I can just take the subway twenty minutes to go see something interesting for a story or talk to somebody interesting or explore physically and not just feel like I’m making phone calls and Googling. It’s a very different kind of work, but it’s just not something that was super available.”

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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Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has written for The Believer, The LA Review of Books, Transition and The Paris Review. "If He Hollers Let Him Go," her essay on Dave Chappelle, was a 2014 National Magazine Award finalist.

"So the stakes are high. I’m not just writing this to write. I’m writing because I think there’s something I need to say. And there’s something that needs to be said. ... What I hope is that a young kid or an older person will see that you have choices, that you don't have to accept what people hand to you. That you have control."

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Chris Hayes hosts All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and is an editor-at-large for The Nation.

"The instability was so intense and the anguish and frustration were so intense that there wasn’t a ton of time to think through, 'Well, what is my role in this?' Mostly it was: wake up in the morning after two or three hours of sleep and start going to stuff, talking to people, and keep doing that until the show happens."

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Joel Lovell, deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, interviewed live at the University of Pittsburgh.

"I think if you can make a writer feel like it's okay to not know what they're doing—they don't really know exactly what their story is, they're a little lost in their material—that's a fine place to be. If you can sort of talk it through, if you can minimize their anxiety a little bit, then I think you've done most of your job. After that it's just looking at the words and just figuring out which ones work."

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Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

"I like an older awesome lady, I don't think enough is written about older awesome ladies and I don't think there are enough role models for younger awesome ladies. It’s great fun hanging out with an older awesome lady. It’s inspiring. And it makes you think 'Jesus, I might be rocking it when I’m 80!'"

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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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Emily Witt is a freelance writer and the author of Future Sex.

“I think I had always thought that—maybe this is coming from a WASPy, protestant background—if I presented myself as overtly sexual in any way, it would be a huge turnoff. That they would see me as a certain type of person. They wouldn’t have respect for me. And I thought this both professionally—I thought maybe writing this book was going to be really bad for my career, that nobody would take me seriously anymore—and also that nobody would want to date me if I was too honest. In both counts the opposite happened.”

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Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air.

“Part of my philosophy of life is that you have to live with a certain amount of delusion. And part of the delusion I live with is that maybe, from experience, I’m getting a little bit better. But then the other part of me, the more overpowering part of me, is the pessimistic part that says, ‘It’s going to be downhill from here.’ I try not to judge myself too much because I’m so self-judgmental that I don’t want to over-judge and get into too much of ‘Am I better than I was yesterday, or not?’”

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Steven Levy covers technology for Wired, where he is the editor of Backchannel.

“It’s about people. Travis Kalanick’s foibles aren’t because he’s a technology executive. It’s because he’s Travis Kalanick. That’s the way he is. There is a certain strain in Silicon Valley, which rewards totally driven people, but that is humanity. And advanced technology is no guarantee—and as a matter of fact I don’t think it’ll do anything—from stopping ill-intentioned people from doing ill-intentioned things.”

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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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