Seth Wickersham is a senior writer for ESPN. His latest article is "For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, Is This the Beginning of the End?"

“You want to write about something real. I hate stories that are, the tension of the story is, talk radio perception versus the reality that I see when I’m with somebody. I can’t stand those stories because to me, you’re just writing about the ether versus a real person, and that’s not a real tension to me. The inner tensions are the best tensions. You can’t get to them with everybody, but you try.”

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Frank Rich, a former culture and political columnist for The New York Times, writes for New York and is the executive producer of Veep.

“All audiences bite back. If you have an opinion—forget about whether it’s theater or politics. If it’s about sports, fashion, or food—it doesn’t really matter. Readers are gonna bite back. And they should, you know? Everyone’s entitled. Everyone’s a critic. Everyone should have an opinion. You’re not laying down the law, and people should debate it.”

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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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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."

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Zach Baron is a staff writer for GQ.

“People love to put celebrity stuff or culture stuff lower on the hierarchy than, say, a serial killer story. I think they're all the same story. If you crack the human, you crack the human.”

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Katherine Eban is an investigative journalist and contributing writer at Fortune Magazine. Her new book is Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom.

“I am not known for my optimism. I think it’s hard to do this work and retain a sunny view of humankind. I hate to say that. On the other hand, I do believe there will always be whistleblowers. And it’s interesting to me that even in the darkest spaces, even when it looks like everything is arrayed against them, there are people who will say: ‘This just isn’t right, and I must do something.’ Which is kind of extraordinary.”

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Ashley Feinberg is a senior writer at Slate. She recently uncovered Mitt Romney's secret Twitter account.

“The whole thing about politics is that they are basically creating this character, this mask, and that is who they are supposed to be. That is who they try to project to the world. We know that it’s not really them but we have no access to what they actually are. This is the closest we get to seeing what they’re doing when they think no one is watching. … This is the most unfiltered access to what they’re actually thinking.”

Robert Kolker is the author of Lost Girls and a contributing editor at New York.

"For better or for worse, my heart's not in the mystery. I want [the killer] to be caught—he's obviously a predator and he's unstable. But they all are. They're all messed up people who victimize other people and they all look normal. The art and science of catching serial killers has become more than slightly overblown in our society. And you know, I love Silence of the Lambs … but I'm not entirely sure that our obsession with who the serial killer is and why a serial killer does it is in proportion with how interesting they end up being."

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Elon Green is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Awl, New York, and other publications. His new book is Last Call: A True Story of Love, Lust, and Murder in Queer New York.

“The murders and the murderer should not be the driver. It should simply be the catalyst for the other story. And the other story is the victims. And the other story is the political backdrop and the environment that they are walking through.”

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