Paige Williams is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of The Dinosaur Artist: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Quest for Earth's Ultimate Trophy.

“I was just sitting in a coffee shop and saw this thing about a Montana dinosaur thief, and thought, oh that’s really interesting, I don’t know anything about that. And I knew nothing about natural history, nothing about natural history museums. I was born and raised in Mississippi. We didn’t talk about that kind of stuff. I grew up in the Baptist church. It certainly wasn’t mentioned there. … It just was a world completely alien to me, which I love. I love going into worlds that I know nothing about, and I like to take them apart and put them back together again.”

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Jesse David Fox covers comedy for Vulture, where he hosts the podcast Good One. His new book is Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work.

“There’s a complete lack of anyone who’s ever written about comedy seriously compared to any other art form. There’s just nothing. … So the challenge was, how do you start a conversation that no one has been participating in?”

Elif Batuman is a novelist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her latest article is “Japan’s Rent-a-Family Industry.”

“I hear novelists say things sometimes like the character does something they don’t expect. It’s like talking to people who have done ayahuasca or belong to some cult. That’s how I felt about it until extremely recently. All of these people have drunk some kind of Kool Aid where they’re like, ‘I’m in this trippy zone where characters are doing things.’ And I would think to myself, if they were men—Wow, this person has devised this really ingenious way to avoid self-knowledge. If they were women, I would think—Wow, this woman has found an ingenious way to become complicit in her own bullying and silencing. It’s only kind of recently—and with a lot of therapy actually—that I’ve come to see that there is a mode of fiction that I can imagine participating in where, once I’ve freed myself of a certain amount of stuff I feel like I have to write about, which has gotten quite large by this point, it would be fun to make things up and play around.”

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Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine who has reported on Afghanistan since 2008. His new book is The Naked Don’t Fear the Water: An Underground Journey with Afghan Refugees.

“I think at some point you just say, screw it. I'm gonna act like a human being and help my friend. That's the most important thing. You actually realize, yeah, now that we're in it together, the only thing that matters is both of us staying alive and staying safe and getting where we need to go. And whatever I have to do to do that, I'm going to do.”

Delia Cai is the senior vanities correspondent for Vanity Fair and publishes the media newsletter Deez Links. Her debut novel Central Places is out this week.

“This was in like, 2011, where I think actual journalists were still trying to figure out ‘Is it gross to be a brand?’ And at least in school, they were all about it. They’re like, ‘You need a brand, you need to think about what your niche is going to be, you need to think about engaging your audience.’ We had to make websites, we had to blog, and of course, all of us being college students, we started using our blogs to write about each other. We used Twitter to talk shit about each other in a very thinly veiled way. So really, it was the best training for being online.”

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, has also written for GQ, Philadelphia and SELF.

"I think that people are, by their nature, good and want to act rightly. So I'm very interested in why people do these things that result in really bad actions. My lack of outrage actually is one of the things that probably helps me in my reporting because I really am propelled by this pure curiosity. ... I just want to know, 'Where did that come from?'"

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Adam Moss is the editor of New York Magazine.

“I think [change] is good for journalism—it’s what journalism is about. You can’t write about something static. News is about what is new. So there’s plenty of new right now. I’m not saying it’s good for the citizenry or anything like that, but, yeah, for journalists it’s an extremely interesting time. There’s no denying that.”

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