Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright, and a staff writer for The New Yorker.

”There’s nothing more important about a person than their story. In a way, that’s who we are. And yet, memories fade and people die. So those stories disappear and the job of the journalist is to go out before that happens and accumulate the kinds of stories that are going to help us understand who we are, why we are, where we are right now in time, and try to thread those stories into a coherent narrative. In a way, you give it a kind of immortality. And that’s a big job. It’s a great privilege.”

Graciela Mochkofsky is a writer for The New Yorker and dean of CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She has written six nonfiction books in Spanish. Her new book, her first in English, is The Prophet of the Andes.

“It connects with me as a journalist, actually — it’s this idea of just seeking truth and how elusive that is. So this is a person who thinks he can get to the true meaning of God and of how he needs to live. And he thinks that by asking the right questions, and by reading, and reading, and reading, and by discussing collectively, he can get to the truth. And he can’t.”

Evan Ratliff, a co-host of the Longform Podcast, is host of the new podcast Persona: The French Deception.

“One of these big scams is like a story. And in the story, what they're doing is they're manipulating you to be a participant in the story, and they're getting you so hooked that you will not just do anything they say, but you will invest yourself in bringing the story to its conclusion. And like, isn't that what you're doing if you're trying to get someone to listen to eight episodes, spend that much of their life listening to your voice? … The idea that every story has this person pulling the strings... I like revisiting that in everything that I do."

Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The New York Times. His recent book is The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend.

“If I stab you, I'm going to stab you in the chest, not the back. You're going to see it coming. ... But if you're going to tell me something's wrong, you have to keep talking. I'm not going to take your word for it. I have a reason for why I believe my reporting to be true, and I'm going to present it to you as best I can. But just because you say something's wrong doesn't make it so.”

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.”

Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker. "The Really Big One," her article about the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.

“I can tell you in absolute sincerity: I didn't realize I was writing a scary story. Obviously I know the earthquake is going to be terrifying, and that our lack of preparedness is genuinely really scary. But, as I think often happens as a reporter, you toggle between professional happiness, which is sometimes, frankly, even professional glee—you’re just so thrilled you’re getting what you’re getting—and then the sort of more human and humane response, which comes every time you really set down your pen and think about what it is you’re actually reporting about.”

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Sarah Schweitzer is a former feature writer for the Boston Globe.

“I just am drawn, I think, to the notion that we start out as these creatures that just want love and were programmed that way—to try to find it and to make our lives whole. We are, as humans, so strong in that way. We get knocked down, and adults do some horrible things to us because adults have had horrible things done to [them]. There are some terrible cycles in this world. But there’s always this opportunity to stop that cycle. And there are people who come along who do try that in their own flawed ways.”

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Matthew Power is a freelance writer and contributing editor at Harper's.

"The kind of stories I've gotten to do have involved fulfilling my childhood fantasies of having an adventurous life. Even though I don't make a ton of money doing it, I've never felt like I was missing out on something. I haven't worked in an office since a two-week stint as a fact checker at House and Garden magazine in 2001, so that's 12 years, and I haven't starved to death yet."

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Alexis Okeowo, a foreign correspondent, has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Businessweek.

“Nigeria is a deeply sexist country. It can be difficult for people to take you seriously. But that also has its benefits, because it’s very easy to disarm your subjects. If I’m interviewing people who underestimate me, I can get them to open up because they somehow think that I’m naïve or I don’t know what I’m doing. So I don’t mind if some sexist general or banker thinks I’m this young little student who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. As long as you tell me what I want to know, it’s great.”

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Jeanne Marie Laskas writes for GQ and the New York Times Magazine. Her latest book is To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope.

“I hate saying this out loud, but it’s true: I’m really shy. Fundamentally, I'm 100% scared most of the time. I’m scared and wondering how I can not be noticed because I don’t know what to say and I’m shy. If you say I’m a good listener, that's why … I become more invisible so I’m more comfortable.”

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Kevin Kelly is a writer and a founding executive editor of Wired Magazine. He is the author of What Technology Wants, Out of Control and The Inevitable: Understanding the Twelve Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

“I always try to write about the future—and it became harder and harder because things would catch up so fast. If you read Out of Control now, I’ve heard that people say, ‘well, this is obvious.’ I have to tell you, it was dismissed as entirely pie-in-the-sky, wild-eyed craziness twenty-five years ago.”

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Andrea Bernstein is a journalist and co-host of Trump, Inc., a podcast from WNYC and ProPublica. Her new book is American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.

“Hope is an action. And I feel that writing and documenting is an action. When I stop doing those things, I will be hopeless. But because I am still doing those things, it means that I still have hope… so long as we continue to be actors in the world, we can be hopeful human beings.”

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Dana Goodyear is a staff writer for The New Yorker and host of the new podcast Lost Hills.

“I do find people who take risks—artistic and physical or even intellectual risks—really interesting. ... There are so many people that I have written about who take a really long time with their projects, whether years or decades, and they might or might not work out. ... They just don't go along with what's received, and they—at a great personal cost—often do things that are very different. And then those things are the things in our world that are the most fascinating or feel the most human.”

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Mitchell S. Jackson is a journalist and author. His profile of Ahmaud Arbery, ”Twelve Minutes and a Life,” won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

”What is 'great'? 'Great' isn’t really sales, right? No one cares what James Baldwin sold. So: Are you doing the important work?”

Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and several other books. Her new memoir is Grief Is for People.

“You take a little sliver of yourself and you offer it up to be spun around in perpetuity in the public imagination. That is the sacrifice you make. And it makes everything just a little bit worse. So it's the opposite of catharsis, but it's worth it. It's worth it for what you get in return: a book.”

Kelsey McKinney is a features writer and co-owner at Defector.com. She hosts the podcast Normal Gossip and is the author of the upcoming book You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip.

“I was always very interested in how you strategize a creative career. And I think that that is an unsexy thing to talk about, right? It's much sexier to be like, Oh, I love working on my sentence-level craft, which is not true for me. But I think that a lot of a creative career is understanding it is still a job, and then understanding how you make sure that within the container of the job you can do the work that you want to do. That is a really difficult balance to make. So if you can understand how people who have done it before you, you can copy them.”

Reggie Ugwu is an arts reporter for The New York Times.

“I find that even though I talk to celebrities or popular artists, I’m not all that interested in celebrity. I’m pretty uninterested in celebrity. But I’m really interested in creativity.”

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Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN. His new book is Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last.

“If you’re going to write a profile of someone … you have to find some piece of common ground with them so that no matter how famous or good or noble or bad—or no matter how cartoonish their most well-known attributes are—it shrinks them. And once they’re small enough to fit in your hand, I think it changes the entire experience of asking questions about their lives.”

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Albert Samaha is an investigative journalist and the deputy inequality editor at BuzzFeed News. His book Concepcion: An Immigrant Family's Fortunes comes out in October.

“I don’t think any child of the recession will ever not feel precarious. And being in journalism makes that even more so. ... At this point I’ve embraced the precarity of working in this industry. I’m sure at some point it’s going to be grating for people to hear me talk about how precarious and insecure I feel. … But I’ve got too many friends who are way too talented, who can’t use that talent in the ways that they are passionate about, for me to ever feel like my place in this industry is fully cemented.”

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Brian Reed and Hamza Syed are co-hosts of the new podcast The Trojan Horse Affair.

“I had lost all faith in the reporting that already happened on the subject matter. And that was my mentality with each source and each interviewer. I wanted the debate ended in the room because I didn't want commentary beyond it. I didn't want any kind of interpretation beyond it. I wanted the situation to be resolved there and then…. And without certain answers, I thought we weren't going to be able to speak about this matter in the way that I wanted to speak about it.” —Syed

“I both desperately wanted to know the answer of who wrote the letter, but kind of understood that we probably weren't going to get it beyond a shadow of a doubt. And I thought that I had transmitted that to Hamza and that he understood that. But as time went on, I realized that he had not accepted that as the likely outcome. And this is what was actually so energizing to work with you, Hamza. You never let your hope and desire and hunger to get that answer ever get dimmed. Like, ever.” —Reed

Peggy Orenstein is a journalist and author. Her latest book is Unraveling.

“The challenge is… to not want to say, I need to know what the book is about. I need to have my chapters. I need to know what exactly I'm looking for. Because it's really scary to just go out and report and have trust that there's going to be interesting things and that if you just keep going, you're going to find them. So to not foreclose possibility and options and ideas is the biggest reporting challenge for those sorts of books for me.”

Joseph Cox is a cybersecurity journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. His new book is Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever.

“In the not too distant future, I will be a very old man, and maybe I won't be able to spend all day talking to drug traffickers. I will be mentally and physically exhausted. So I will doggedly pursue the story right now while I can.”

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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Alexis C. Madrigal is an editor-at-large for Fusion, where he’s producing the upcoming podcast, Containers.

“Sometimes you think like, 'Man the media business is the worst. This is so hard.' When you spend time with all these other business people, you probably are going to say, ‘Capitalism is the worst. This is hard.’ Competition that’s linked to global things is so hard because global companies are locked in this incredible efficiency battle that just drives all of the slack out of the system. Like media, there’s no slack left, and I don’t know where things go after that.”

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Kara Swisher is the executive editor and co-founder of Recode.

“I do the work. I just work harder than other people. I really do. I work harder, I interview more people, I call more people, I text more people. And so I find out, and they can not talk to me — fine. I know anyway. I’d like to talk to you, I’d like to give you a chance. I’d like to be fair. I’d like to hear your side of the story. And the most important thing is, I think smart people – and these are very smart people — like smart questions. They don’t like the fawning questions. They don’t like being licked up and down all day. Some of the day they like it. They want someone who knew them before they were billionaires. Because when you’re a billionaire, every day you’re so smart. Everyone wants something from you.”

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