Ashlee Vance covers technology for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

“To be totally clear, I don’t cover them (apps). I like people who try to solve big problems. Wherever I go, I try to run away from the consumer stuff. I love writing about giant manufacturing plants that make stuff and employ tens of thousands of people.”

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Eli Saslow is a Pulitzer-winning feature writer for the Washington Post. His new book is Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist.

“If I'm writing about somebody once for 5,000 words in the Washington Post — someone who's addicted to drugs, say — I am choosing in the public eye where their story ends. Like, that's it. People aren't going to know any more. That's where I'm going to leave them being written about. And of course, that is inherently artificial — nothing ends, their life is continuing. This is just where the narrative ends. I recognize the weight in ways that maybe I didn’t before.”

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Linda Villarosa directs the journalism program at the City College of New York and is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine. Her article "Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis" was one of Longform's Top Ten of 2018. She is at work on a new book, Under the Skin: Race, Inequality and the Health of a Nation, due out in 2020.

“I think at the beginning I was afraid to say it right out, so I think I was saying ‘racial bias’ or something like that. Then I stopped. ... I think how I learned about it both in earlier reporting and in grad school and in my own research was that race is a risk factor for a bunch of different health problems, whether it’s heart disease, infant and maternal mortality, or HIV. It’s just said that race is a risk factor. It’s disproportionate. What it really is is that race is a risk factor, but it’s also a risk marker. Instead of looking at what individuals are doing wrong, it’s what society is doing wrong in creating problems for individual people which lead to health crisis. It’s sort of like bias, related to racism, is creating problems in people’s actual bodies. That’s what I came to understand. It really shifts the blame off the individual.”

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Kierna Mayo is the showrunner and head writer for the Lena Horne Prize for Artists Creating Social Impact. She is the former editor-in-chief of EBONY and Honey Magazine, which she co-founded at age 27.

Guest host Patrice Peck is a freelance journalist and writes the Coronavirus News for Black Folks newsletter. Her most recent article is "Black Journalists Are Exhausted," an op-ed published in The New York Times.

“Advocacy is not a bad word. Telling the truth about a particular slice of life is what my career has been. That slice of life started about young people who were partaking in hip hop culture. Most of them were of color, most of them were poor. So that was a perspective. If you begin to tell the stories of those people at that time, that begins to have an advocacy feel and taste and touch. Not even with a consciousness to it. Because this is a lost voice. This is a lost point of view. It is not in the mainstream. It is not being centered. No one is telling it. So the mere act of shedding light journalistically in places where there has been no light before is advocacy. Sorry, journalists. Sorry, all you impartial, fair-and-balanced folks.”

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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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Hamilton Morris is the science editor for Vice and a contributor to Harper's.

"It's a shame that there isn't more of an interdisciplinary approach to a lot of scientific investigations, because often the result is that misinformation is produced. Again, there's misinformation in journalism and there's misinformation in science. And if you combine the best elements of both of those disciplines you can come a little bit closer to the truth. If you want to understand a drug phenomenon, you're going to need to look at it medically, chemically, anthropologically, you need to talk to people, you need to interview people, you need to look at the drug policy, the chemistry, the history—there's a lot of different factors that need to be examined in order to understand even the most simple, minute drug phenomenon. And if you're approaching something purely as a scientist, as an academic, there are huge limitations as to what you can do."

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Christie Aschwanden is a freelance science writer. Her latest book is Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery.

“I think every writer has this sort of obsession in a story that they write over and over in different forms. For me, it’s about belief and how do we decide what to believe. How do we choose what evidence is credible? How do we make those decisions?”

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Joshua Yaffa is a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker. His first book is Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia.

“Especially in a place like Russia, where there’s a lot of sensitivity around what people might tell you—when they do open up to you, there’s a lot of trust there. And you better not abuse it or mishandle it, because you could put people in danger. Just being a decent person, and demonstrating that decency, goes a long way.”

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Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering are documentary filmmakers. Their latest miniseries is Allen v. Farrow.

”We're constantly looking for those moments that happen before the story is ever told. Or those moments where someone is deciding to tell a story or is going through a process that they think is private. … We think there's something about getting the moment before the first moment that people normally see.”

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee is a contributing writer for National Geographic and the New York Times Magazine. His new podcast is Chameleon: Scam Likely.

“I want a crumpled piece of paper where there are enough ridges and valleys and lines for me to be able to navigate, and they have to be authentic. And then of course the best stories among them will have surprise and intrigue, and things that are completely unexpected happen somewhere along the way. But it's hard to anticipate all of that. You still have to have a little bit of faith.”

Lena Dunham, the creator and star of HBO's Girls, is the co-founder of Lenny and the author of Not That Kind of Girl. A special episode hosted by Longform Podcast editor Jenna Weiss-Berman.

“Writing across mediums can be a really healthy way to utilize your energy and stay productive while not feeling entrapped. But at the end of the day, the time when I feel like life is most just, like, flying by and I don't even know what's happening to me is when I'm writing prose. It's such an intimate relationship that you're having. When you're writing a script, you're making a blueprint for something that doesn't exist yet. But when you're writing prose, the thing exists immediately. And that's really satisfying. It's the best place to go for my deepest and most in-the-now concerns.”

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Max Chafkin is a features editor and reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek. His new book is The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power.

“I think there's like a really good way to come up with story ideas where you basically just look for people who have given TED Talks and figure out what they're lying about. And there's also a tendency in the press to pump up these startups based on those stories. ... It's worth taking a critical look at these stars of the moment. Because often there's not as much there as we think. And if you’re talking about Theranos or something, there's some potential to do harm—but also it means that maybe more worthwhile efforts are not getting the attention they deserve.”

Abe Streep is a journalist and contributing editor for Outside. His new book is Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana.

”The way journalists talk about, ‘Did you get the story?’—that's not how I see this. That would be extractive in this setting, I think. If someone shares something personal with me, that is a serious matter. It's a gift and you’ve got to treat it with great respect.”

Ann Friedman is a writer, editor and co-founder of Tomorrow.

"The notion of kissing up is super weird to me. You should always be kissing down and sideways, to the people who are going to be working alongside you and coming up behind you. I'm really aware of my impending irrelevance. ... I'm waiting for that day when I'm in dire need of work and 65 years old—because none of us are retiring, obviously—and I don't understand how to write on Google Glass or whatever we're composing on then. I want there to be some journalist who remembers when I got on the phone with her in 2013 and helped her negotiate for her first salary and throws me a fucking bone. I think about that moment a lot."</i>

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George Saunders has written for The New Yorker and GQ. His latest collection of short stories is Tenth of December.

“Maybe you would understand your artistry to be: put me anywhere. I'll find human beings, I'll find human interest, I'll find literature. And I guess you could argue the weirder, or maybe the less explored the place, the better.”

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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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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.”

Evan Hughes is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The Atavist and many others. His book, just out in paperback, is Pain Hustlers: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup.

“It should be called slow-form journalism…. It is heavily edited. It’s heavily fact checked. And chances are, you’re not going to be the first. Maybe you’re going to be first to reveal some piece of it. I have made peace with like, I’m not the scoop guy. I’m the person who comes in and I’m good at telling the story in a thorough and deep way.”

S.L. Price is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated.

“The fact is, if you write about sports and people think they're just reading about sports, they'll read about drug use. They'll read about sex. They'll read about sex change. They'll read about communism. They'll read about issues they couldn't possibly care about, issues that if they saw them in any other part of the paper they would just gloss over. But because it's about sports—because there's a boxing ring or a baseball field or a football field—they'll be more patient and you can get some issues under the transom.”

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Michael Pollan writes for The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker and is the author of nine books. His latest is How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

“I don’t like writing as an expert. I’m fine doing public speeches as an expert. Or writing op-ed pieces as an expert. But as a writer, it’s a killer. Nobody likes an expert. Nobody likes to be lectured at. And if you’ve read anything I’ve written, I’m kind of an idiot on page one. I am the naïve fish out of water. I’m learning though. The narrative that we always have as writers is our own education on the topic. We can recreate the process of learning that's behind the book.”

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Tyler Cowen is an economist, the co-founder of Marginal Revolution, and the host of Conversations with Tyler. His latest book is The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.

“I think of my central contribution, or what I’m trying to have it be, is teaching people to think of counter arguments. I’m trying to teach a method: always push things one step further. What if, under what conditions, what would make this wrong? If I write something and people respond to it that way, then I feel very happy and successful. If people just agree with me, I’m a little disappointed.”

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Thomas Morton is a writer and former correspondent for HBO's Vice News. He was at Vice from 2004-2019 and is a major character in Jill Abramson's Merchants of Truth.

“You have to go with your gut and I feel like that’s one of the most essential qualities in doing anything of the nature of what we did. Of making documentaries or reporting news or current events, you really have to have a good sense of intuition for who you’re dealing with, what they’re telling you, what you’re telling them, how you’re behaving. It’s all human interaction, you can’t govern that with hard and fast rules or with extremely set rules. Beyond the extreme ones there are always going to be murky areas. You have to be willing to accept that and work with those.”

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Clare Malone is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she covers the media. Her latest article is ”Hasan Minhaj’s ‘Emotional Truths.’”

“You're going to work a lot of hours if you want to be successful, and you're probably not going to make as much money as your dumb friend from college does. You're choosing it for a different reason, but I do think we have to make efforts to have the [journalism] industry be a middle-class profession.”

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

“I think the job is just paying a bunch of attention. If you're a person like me, where thoughts and worries are intruding on your consciousness all the time, it is a great relief to have something to just over-describe and over-pay-attention to—and kind of just give all of your latent, usually anxious attention to this one thing. That, to me, is a great joy.”

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