Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between the World and Me. His new novel is The Water Dancer. Chris Jackson is Coates's editor, and the publisher and editor-in-chief of One World.

“I don’t think an essay works unless I can pin a story to it. You don’t want people to just say, ‘Oh that was a cool argument.’ You want people to say, ‘I could not stop thinking about this.’ You want them to nudge their wives and husbands and say, ‘You have to read this.’ You want them to be bothered by it.”

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Ronan Farrow is a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter for The New Yorker. He is the author of Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators and hosts The Catch and Kill Podcast.

“It was the opposite of anything I would’ve expected, breaking a story like that. It wasn’t a moment of celebration. I was immensely relieved, and immensely grateful for the sources … and I was so grateful for those people at the New Yorker who had worked so hard. But it was a strange, numb time for me that ended, at the end of that day, with me bursting into tears.”

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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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Connie Walker is an investigative reporter and podcast host. Her new show is Stolen: The Search for Jermain.

“For so long, there has been this kind of history of journalists coming in and taking stories from Indigenous communities. And that kind of extractive, transactional kind of journalism really causes a lot of harm. And so much of our work is trying to undo and address that. There is a way to be a storyteller and help amplify and give people agency in their stories.”

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Erin Lee Carr is a documentary filmmaker and writer. Her new film is Mommy Dead and Dearest.

“I feel like I’ve always had the story down—that’s not been really difficult for me. So the difficult thing, I think, for me, has always been access. Can I get the access? Can I withstand the pressure? You know, there’s been so many times where I wasn’t being paid to do the job, and I had to wait on the access. And it’s not for the faint of heart. You know, I could have spent a year and a half of my life doing [Mommy Dead and Dearest] and I could’ve not gotten the access to Gypsy, and it kind of would’ve been a wash.”

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Casey Newton writes the Platformer newsletter. Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The New York Times. Together they co-host the podcast Hard Fork.

CN: “People actually like to be a little bit confused. They like listening to things where people are talking about things they don’t quite understand, which was very counterintuitive to me. I think a lot of editor-types would scoff at, but I’ve come around.”

KR: “We can revisit subjects and we do. We can change our minds. Print pieces feel so permanent, they feel so definitive. Podcasts, we can just sort of say, ‘I don't know what to make of this, ask me again in a month.’”

Jazmine Hughes is an associate editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and The New Republic.

“You hope that one day when you’re the editor-in-chief of Blah Blah Blah that you’ll wake up and be like, ‘Okay, I deserve my job.’ But so far I haven’t met anyone who has told me that they feel that way. But, I will say, I don’t talk to white men a lot.”

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Scott Anderson is a war correspondent and novelist. He’s written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and more.

“I really feel that what’s at the root of so many wars now, modern wars, unconventional wars, it really just comes down to a bunch of young guys with access to guns coming up with a pretext to rape and murder and pillage and steal from their neighbors.”

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Rebecca Traister writes for New York. Her new book is Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.

“I don’t want my experience to be held up as so, ladies, your new health regimen is rage all day. Because the fact is we live in a world that does punish women for expressing their anger, that denies them jobs, that attaches to them bad reputations as difficult-to-work-with, crazy bitches. Because they’re reasonably angry about something they have every reason to be angry about. We live in a world in which black women’s anger is either caricatured and they get written off as cartoons, or regarded as threats and face steep, often physical penalties for expressing dissent or dissatisfaction. When I talk about this, I don’t mean it to be prescriptive, I mean it to be descriptive of a particular experience I had that was extraordinarily unusual but which made me question a premise that I think all of us internalize that the anger is bad for us. I no longer believe that that’s true.”

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Seyward Darby is the editor-in-chief of The Atavist Magazine and the author of Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism.

“The most enlightening thing I learned in working on this book ultimately was that when we think of hate we think of animosity. Hate means I do not like someone or I do not like something. I deplore it. I despise it. But hate as a movement is actually a lot more like any social movement where it’s providing something to its supporters, members, acolytes that they were seeking but didn’t necessarily know where they were going to find it. So it could be camaraderie, it could be power, it could be purpose, in some cases it could be money. There’s something terrifyingly mundane about that.”

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Katherine Eban is an investigative journalist and contributor to Vanity Fair. Her latest article is ”The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins.”

”You can't make a correction unless you know why something happened. So imagine—if this is a lab leak—the earth shattering consequences for virology. For the science community, for how research is done, for how research is regulated. Or if it is a zoonotic origin, we have to know how our human incursion into wild spaces could be unleashing these viruses. Because COVID-19 is one thing, but we're going to be looking at COVID-25 and COVID-34. We have to know what caused this.”

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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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John Seabrook is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.

“Whether or not the piece succeeds or fails is not going to depend on whether I’m up to the minute on the latest social media spot to hang out or the latest slang words that are thrown around. It’s going to be the old eternal verities of structural integrity. So much of it is narrative and figuring out the tricks—and they are tricks, really—that make it go as a narrative. And that’s really the most interesting thing. Because you never ultimately have a formula that goes from piece to piece; it’s always going to have to be rediscovered every time you work on a long piece. And that’s kind of fun.”

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Kurt Andersen is the co-founder of Spy Magazine, the author of several books, and the host of Studio 360.

“As a young person, I never thought of myself as a risk-taker. Then I did this risky thing that shouldn't have succeeded, I started this magazine. And it did encourage me to think, ‘Eh, how bad can it be if it fails? Sometimes these long shots work. So fuck it, try it.’”

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David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new book is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

“The more stories I reported over time, the more I just realized there are parts of the story I can’t always get to. You know, unless this is a reality show and there’s 18 cameras in every room, and people [talk] before they sleep, and maybe you have some mind-bug in their brain for their unconscious, there are just parts you’re just not gonna know. You get as close as you can. And so the struggle to me is to get as close as I can, to peel it back as close as I can, but understanding that there will be elements, there will be pieces, that will remain lingering doubts.”

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Patricia Lockwood is a poet and essayist. Her new book is Priestdaddy: A Memoir.

“[Prose writing is] strange to me as a poet. I’m like, ‘Well I guess I’ll tell you just what happened then.’ But the humor has to be there as well. Because in my family household…the absurdity or the surrealism that we have is in reaction to the craziness of the household. So something like your underwear-clad father with his hand in a vat of pickles, sitting in a room full of $10,000 guitars and telling you that he can’t afford to send you to college—that’s bad. That’s a sad scene. But it’s also totally a lunatic scene. It’s, just the very fact of it, all these accoutrements, all the elements of the scene—they are funny.”

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Mara Shalhoup was until recently the editor-in-chief of LA Weekly. She is the author of BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family.

“I’m so fearful about what it will look like for cities without an outlet for [alt-weekly] stories. And for young writers, who need and deserve the hands-on editing these kind of editors can give them and help really launch careers … it’s a tragedy for journalism. It’s a tragedy for young people, people of color. It’s a tragedy for the subjects of stories that won’t get written now. That’s just the reality.”

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Zoe Chace is a reporter and producer at This American Life.

“Radio is a movie in your head. It’s a very visual thing. It’s a transporting thing—when it’s done well. And it’s louder than your thoughts. It is both of those things. It would just take me out of the place that I was, where I was lost and couldn’t figure things out. ... They had a very personal way of telling the story to you, so that you kind of felt like you’re there with them. Like it’s less lonely, it’s literally less lonely to have them there. And that felt really good.”

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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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Malcolm Gladwell is a New Yorker staff writer, the author The Tipping Point and Blink, and the host of Revisionist History. His new podcast is Broken Record.

“The loveliest thing is to interview someone who’s never been interviewed before. To sort of watch them in a totally novel experience. Particularly when you’re interviewing them about things they never thought were worthy of an interview. That’s a really lovely experience. It’s like watching a kid on a roller coaster for the first time. But a celebrity is a very different kind of experience. The bar for them is quite high. They’ve been interviewed a million times, so you have to be on your game. You have to take them somewhere that’s a little unfamiliar to get them to perk up. Otherwise it’s just another of a long line of interviews. It’s a lot more demanding.”

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Carvell Wallace is a podcast host and has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. He is the co-author, with Andre Iguodala, of The Sixth Man.

“So much of my life experience coalesces into things that are useful… All those years that I was obsessing over this that or the other thing, all the weird stuff that I would do, all the weird things that happened to me, all the places I found myself in that I didn’t want to be in but were interesting - this is all part of what makes me the writer that I am today.”

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Elizabeth Wurtzel, who died today, was the author of four books, including Prozac Nation. This episode was originally published in October 2013.

"It's not that hard to be a lawyer. Any fool can be a lawyer. It's really hard to be a writer. You have to be born with incredible amounts of talent. Then you have to work hard. Then you have to be able to handle tons of rejection and not mind it and just keep pushing away at it. You have to show up at people's doors. You can't just e-mail and text message people. You have to bang their doors down. You have to be interesting. You have to be fucking phenomenal to get a book published and then sell the book. When people think their writing career is not working out, it's not working out because it's so damn hard. It's not harder now than it was 20 years ago. It's just as hard. It was always hard."

Nilay Patel is editor-in-chief of The Verge and hosts the podcast Decoder.

“The instant ability—unmanaged ability—for people to say horrible things to each other because of phones is tearing our culture apart. It just is. And so sometimes, I’m like, Man, I wish our headline had been: ‘iPhone Released. It’s A Mistake.’ … But I think there’s a really important flipside to that … a bunch of teenagers are able to create culture at a scale that has never been possible before. Also, a bunch of marginalized communities are able to speak with coordinated voices and make change very rapidly. And that balance—I don’t think we’ve quite understood.”

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Heidi Blake is a writer for The New Yorker and the author of two books, From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West and The Ugly Game: The Corruption of FIFA and the Qatari Plot to Buy the World Cup, with Jonathan Calvert. Her latest article is “The Fugitive Princess of Dubai.”

“I definitely feel as an investigative reporter that I feel very driven by my own capacity for shock and outrage and genuinely feeling like this is unbelievable. And that kind of makes me want to keep digging. And once I stop feeling that on any given topic, I lose interest. And so I’ve always been a generalist, and I just kind of rove from one topic to the next. I’m always finding myself in new territory where I know absolutely nothing about the thing I’m starting to dig into and have to try and play catch up and get my head around something new.”

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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