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.”

Ryan Mac and Craig Silverman are reporters at BuzzFeed News. Together they won this year's George Polk Award for Business Reporting for their coverage of Facebook's handling of disinformation on its platform. 

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

Wesley Lowery is a correspondent for “60 in 6” from 60 Minutes. He is the author of They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement and won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for "Fatal Force," a Washington Post project covering fatal shootings by police officers.

“The police are not, in and of themselves, objective observers of things. They are political and government entities who are the literal characters in the story. They are describing the actions of people who are protesting them. They have incentives.”

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Parul Sehgal is a book critic for The New York Times.

“I write about books, I review books, but in a sense, to do my job at a newspaper also puts that pressure on a piece to say: why should you read or care about this? You’re trying to tweeze out what is newsworthy, what is interesting, what is vital about this book….My job is I think to be honest with the reader and to keep surfacing new ways for me and for other people to think about books. New vocabularies of pleasure and disgust.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Miles Johnson is an investigative reporter for the Financial Times. He is the author of Chasing Shadows: A True Story of Drugs, War and the Secret World of International Crime and the host of Hot Money: The New Narcos.

“I’m really fascinated always by the ways in which people just have to do really boring parts of running a crime organization … I love the banalities of this stuff. We have a fictionalized version of crime groups and it’s obviously glamorous, and they’re really smart, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s bumbling incompetence as well or just quite unglamorous.”

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times and the author of Fleishman Is in Trouble: A Novel.

“As a profile writer, the skill I have is getting in the room and staying in the room until someone is like, ‘Why is this bitch still in the room? Get her out of there!’ It’s a journalistic skill that is not a fluffy skill. There are people who are always actively trying to prevent your story, prevent you from seeing it, from seeing the things that would be good to see. There’s a lot of convincing, comforting and listening going on. And there’s a lot of dealing with the fact that somebody in the middle of talking to you can suddenly decide that you are the worst. Those things are very tense and it’s a specific skill that I have that can defray all those things. Or it lets me stay.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Netflix, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new book is Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us.

“I used to feel that if I knew everything, that was a good sign. And I've become more aware that if you know everything you want to argue, that's not such a good sign…. Do I have a genuine question? Is there something I’m trying to figure out? Then the story is worth telling. But if I don’t really have a question or if my question is already answered, then maybe that should give you pause.”

Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosopher and journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The Verge, The Believer and many other publications. Her new book is Easy Beauty.

”I literally didn't talk to anyone in my life about disability until I was, like, 30. Ever. Not my husband, not my friends, as little as possible to my own mother. I had this very bad idea that what I needed to do in every single social situation was wait until people could unsee my body…. And it was all in service of trying to be truly recognized or truly seen. And, of course, what was happening is I was involved in a complete act of self erasure because my body and my real self are related…. There is no real me without my physical self…. I did not think I was going to ever write about this, but once I started, it felt like I met myself for the first time.”

Rosecrans Baldwin is a writer and regular contributor to GQ. His latest novel is The Last Kid Left.

“It requires a lot of preparation in order to just have lunch with Roger Federer. Being a person who tends toward anxiety and also a former Boy Scout—put those two things together and I will exhaustively prepare so that I can come across like a complete idiot. The idea of sitting down with someone like that is that you should know everything about their life and their career so that you can go in with 12 questions in the back of your mind.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Breach, CoinTalk, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Jacqueline Charles is the Caribbean correspondent at the Miami Herald.

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

"There are things that you see that if you start taking it in, you’re never going to stop and you’re not going to be able to do your job…I have family in all of these countries and when disaster strikes, you can’t help everyone. But what you hope is that with your pen, with your voice, with your recording of history…somebody somewhere will feel compelled to do something. So that’s what keeps me going."

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.