Masha Gessen has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and others. Her book about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, came out in April.

“The moment she said it, it was obvious that I'd been created to write this story. I'd covered both wars in Chechnya. I'd covered a lot of terrorism. I'd studied terrorism. And I'd been a Russian-speaking immigrant in Boston, which actually is the most important qualification for writing this book. It didn't give me special knowledge, but it gave me a lot of questions that I knew to ask that other people wouldn't.”

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John Heilemann is the managing editor of Bloomberg Politics and the co-author of Game Change and Double Down.

"If you're a writer, and you're not an asshole, you want the maximum number of people to read your stuff. There's nothing wrong with that. There's no great glory in cultivating some niche audience. I do this work because I believe in what I'm doing. I'm not trying to compromise my principles or my standards to get a larger audience. But once I've written the thing of which I feel confident and proud, which I feel is ethically and journalistically sound, I then want the maximum number of people to read it."

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Susan Glasser, the former editor of Politico and Foreign Policy, writes the "Letter from Washington" column for the The New Yorker. Her most recent book, written with Peter Baker, is The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.

“There’s a great benefit to leaving Washington and then coming back, or frankly leaving anywhere and then coming back. I think you have much wider open eyes. Washington, like a lot of company towns, takes on a logic of its own, and things that can seem crazy to the rest of the country, to the rest of the world, somehow end up making more sense than they should when you’re just doing that all day long, every day.”

Joel Lovell, deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine, interviewed live at the University of Pittsburgh.

"I think if you can make a writer feel like it's okay to not know what they're doing—they don't really know exactly what their story is, they're a little lost in their material—that's a fine place to be. If you can sort of talk it through, if you can minimize their anxiety a little bit, then I think you've done most of your job. After that it's just looking at the words and just figuring out which ones work."

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Sloane Crosley is the author of I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number. Her latest essay collection is Look Alive Out There.

“The more extreme things get in reality, the more extreme escapism has to be. It’s like Game of Thrones or bust. But in reality, I think that part of what I’m trying to do with this book — or in anything I write — is to give permission to be mad about little things. Just because there’s all of this, someone still slid their hand down a subway pole and touched you. Or somebody bumped into you. There are still these minor indignities and infractions that occur consistently. And I think there’s some sort of robbing if you tell yourself, Well, I’m not going to be mad about this because of the political landscape that we’re in.”

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Liana Finck writes for The New Yorker. Her new book is Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir.

"I was drawing since I was 10 months old. My mom had left this vibrant community of architects and art people to live in this idyllic country setting with my dad, and she poured all of her art feelings into me. She really praised me for being this baby genius, which I may or may not have been. But I grew up thinking I was an amazing artist. There weren’t any other artists around besides my mom, so I didn’t have anything to compare it to. There were no art classes around. … I was so shy, so I was just always drawing and making things."

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Elizabeth Gilbert has written for Spin, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. She is the author of several books, including Eat, Pray, Love.

“I call it the platinum rule. The golden rule is do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but the platinum rule is even higher: don’t be a dick.”

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Andy Greenwald covers television for Grantland.

“People are enthusiastic about TV. People want to read about it. They want to talk about it. They want to know more. They want to extend its presence in their lives. People used to talk about the water cooler show, but the internet is that water cooler now and people want to be part of the conversation.”

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Grant Wahl is senior writer at Sports Illustrated and the author of The Beckham Experiment.

“I said to Balotelli, ‘I know you’re into President Obama. There’s a decent chance that he might read this story.’ He kind of perked up. I don’t think I was deliberately misleading him. There was a chance!”

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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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Katie Engelhart is a journalist and the author of the new book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die.

“Billions of dollars of government money goes to the nursing home industry every year. And nobody has a nursing home correspondent. Nobody has an assisted living correspondent…. That's wild to me. As a journalist, someone tells me, Oh, there's an industry. It's hugely underregulated. It's getting billions of dollars a year. It is not super-accountable for that money. Who wouldn't want to cover that?”

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Rolf Potts is a veteran travel writer.

"Instead of seeking out the stories, the stories sort of found me. I miss those days. I mean, I make more money from my writing now and I'm probably a better journalist. But having seven-day weeks to wander, month after month, for two years, was a great way to find real and spontaneous and human travel stories."</i>

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Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower and Going Clear, is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

"If I had the chance to interview Osama Bin Laden, should I kill him? It’s a fair question. Suppose we’re having dinner — should I stab him with the bread knife? Do I have a moral obligation to kill him? Or do I have a moral obligation as a reporter to simply hear him?"

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