Andrew Marantz is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new book is Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.

“Some nonfiction can be reduced to a bulletpoint primer, but a good book is a good book. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, it should create a feeling, it should create a world, it should be a feeling that you want to live in and that tilts the way you see things. Isn’t that the point?”

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Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new podcast is Revisionist History.

“The amount of criticism you get is a constant function of the size of your audience. So if you think that, generously speaking, 80% of the people who read your work like it, that means if you sell ten books you have two enemies. And if you sell a million books you have 200,000 enemies. So be careful what you wish for. The volume of critics grows linearly with the size of your audience.”

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Jason Motlagh, a journalist and filmmaker, is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the founder of Blackbeard Films. He won the Polk's Sydney Schanberg Prize for “This Will End in Blood and Ashes,” an account of the collapse of order in Haiti.

“Once you've gotten used to this kind of metabolism, it can be hard to walk away from it. Ordinary life can be a little flat sometimes. And so that's always kind of built in. I accept that. I think I've just tried to be more honest about like, [am I taking this risk] because I need a bump my life? Or do you really believe in what you're doing? And I feel like I really do need to believe in the purpose of the story. There has to be some motivation greater than myself."

This is the last in a series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

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.”

Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker. "The Really Big One," her article about the rupturing of the Cascadia fault line, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize.

“I can tell you in absolute sincerity: I didn't realize I was writing a scary story. Obviously I know the earthquake is going to be terrifying, and that our lack of preparedness is genuinely really scary. But, as I think often happens as a reporter, you toggle between professional happiness, which is sometimes, frankly, even professional glee—you’re just so thrilled you’re getting what you’re getting—and then the sort of more human and humane response, which comes every time you really set down your pen and think about what it is you’re actually reporting about.”

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McKay Coppins is a senior political writer for Buzzfeed News and the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House.

“I am part of the problem. Not in the sense that it’s my fault Trump ran, but in the sense that I’m one of many who for his entire life have mocked him and ridiculed him. He’s a billionaire—I don’t feel any moral guilt about it. But if being I’m honest with myself that same part of me can also, when not checked, be projected onto vast swathes of people. It’s easy to have a lazy classism about the type of people who would vote for Donald Trump.”

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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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Hillary Clinton is the former Democratic nominee for president. Her new book is What Happened.

“I hugged a lot of people after [my concession speech] was over. A lot of people cried … and then it was done. So Bill and I went out and got in the back of the van that we drive around in, and I just felt like all of the adrenaline was drained. I mean there was nothing left. It was like somebody had pulled the plug on a bathtub and everything just drained out. I just slumped over. Sat there. … And then we got home, and it was just us as it has been for so many years—in our little house, with our dogs. It was a really painful, exhausting time.”

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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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Lori Gottlieb is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Her new book is Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.

“Everything that I had done all coalesced into one thing. As a journalist i was helping people to tell their stories, as a therapist I could help people to edit their stories, to change their stories. I could be immersed in the human condition in both of these things.”

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Patrick Symmes is a foreign correspondent and contributor to Outside and Harper's.

"They rolled us up like a cheap carpet. We were locked in a room for 14 hours. And for the first six hours that was okay. Everything was nice; there was coffee. But then the nightshift came on. You could hear gunshots in the street, and these guys were scared. And they were thugs. And they were thugs with a mission: to get rid of every foreigner who might witness what was happening."</i>

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Barton Gellman is a staff writer for The Atlantic and was previously a Pulitzer-winning reporter at The Washington Post. His latest book is Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and his latest essay is "The Election That Could Break America."

“I have found that I have a talent for accidentally pissing people off. ... I’m interested most in accountability and the use and abuse of power. So naturally it’s going to annoy people sometimes. And sometimes they take it like grown-ups and sometimes less so.”

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