David Epstein has reported for ProPublica, Sports Illustrated, and This American Life. His new book is Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

“You can’t just introspect or take a personality quiz and know what you’re good at or interested in. You actually have to try stuff and then reflect on it. That’s how you learn about yourself—otherwise, your insight into yourself is constrained by your roster of experiences.”

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Heather Havrilesky writes the Ask Polly and Ask Molly newsletters. Her latest book is Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage.

“It’s not a good story when you're bullshitting people. I didn't want this book to feel like bullshit…. I wanted to show enough that you could feel reassured that it's normal to feel conflicted about your life and the people in it. It's normal to feel anxious about how much people love you. And it's normal to feel avoidant about how much people love you. It's normal to feel like a failure in the face of trying to stay with someone over the course of your entire life.”

Caitlin Dickerson is a staff writer for The Atlantic covering immigration. Her latest article, on the secret history of U.S. government’s family-separation policy, is ”An American Catastrophe.”

“I think the line that gets drawn around immigration coverage — which, a lot of times you're just talking about a business story or an education story or a national security story — but when you call it an immigration story, it does feel like it is about this other thing, about other people who aren't us.”

Audie Cornish is a journalist and the former host of NPR’s All Things Considered. Her new CNN Audio podcast is The Assignment.

“I think there is journalism inherent in an interview. Like the interview itself should be considered a piece of journalism. It isn't always. Sometimes the vibe is that it’s a little window dressing or that it's personality driven and I don't subscribe to that. I think that it has its own journalism. It's my journalism.”

Eli Sanders is an associate editor at The Stranger and the winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

"There was one particular moment in the trial, which I described, where ... there was just not any human ability to be detached from what was happening in front of you, what was being shared. It was so painful, you could not help but cry, and there was no reason to deny that that moment had happened."

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Emily Nussbaum is a television critic at The New Yorker.

"I actually feel this kind of crazy cause ... because TV is condescended to, has been put down and treated like it's junk, and TV deserves to have the kind of criticism that expects it to be great. To me it's a really engaging and satisfying cause, no matter whether I'm praising or criticizing something."</i>

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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!”

Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, </em>Feverborn</a>, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.</p>

Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept.

"My form of advocacy against the death penalty, frankly, has always been to tell those stories that other people aren’t seeing. And to humanize the people—not just the people facing execution, but everyone around them."

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Nicholson Baker is the author of 18 books of fiction and nonfiction. He has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, and many other publications. His latest book is Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act.

"In the end, I don’t care how famous you get, how widely read you are during your lifetime. You’re going to be forgotten. And you’re going to have five or six fans in the end. It’s going to be your grandchildren or your great-grandchildren are going to say, Oh, yeah, he was big. … So I think the key is, write what you actually care about. Because in the end, you’re only doing this for yourself. … So maybe do your best stuff for yourself and for the three, four, five people who know in the coming century that you ever existed. That’s all you need to do."

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Ben Smith is the media columnist for The New York Times. He was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.

“I do think there's some kind of personality flaw deep in there of wanting to like, you know, find stuff out and tell people.... I'm not sure that's a totally sane or healthy personality trait, but it is definitely, for me, a personality trait…. I think that in political reporting, certainly, there's a kind of reporter who thinks that their job is basically to pull the masks off of these monsters. And I generally tend to think all these people—with some exceptions—are weird and complicated and often doing really awful things. But they aren't necessarily irredeemable or impossible to understand. They're interesting.”

Robert Kolker is the author of Lost Girls and a contributing editor at New York.

"For better or for worse, my heart's not in the mystery. I want [the killer] to be caught—he's obviously a predator and he's unstable. But they all are. They're all messed up people who victimize other people and they all look normal. The art and science of catching serial killers has become more than slightly overblown in our society. And you know, I love Silence of the Lambs … but I'm not entirely sure that our obsession with who the serial killer is and why a serial killer does it is in proportion with how interesting they end up being."

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Evan Wright, a two-time National Magazine Award winner, is the author of Generation Kill.

"When people were killed, civilians especially, I realized I was the only person there who would write it down. I was frantic about getting names, and in the book there are a few Arabic names, some of the victims. Not that anyone cares. But I thought, 'At least somewhere there's a record of this.'"

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Nicholas Carlson writes for Business Insider. His book Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! came out this week.

“To me people are what’s really interesting. Marissa Mayer is a once in a lifetime subject. She’s full of contradictions. … There are a million business stories, but if you don’t have that character at the center then you’re lost.”

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Alexey Kovalev is a Moscow-based journalist and the author of the recent article, “A Message to My Doomed Colleagues in the American Media."

“It’s really disheartening to see how little it takes for people to start believing in something that directly contradicts the empirical facts that they are directly confronting. The Russian TV channel tells you that the pill is red, but the pill in front of you is blue. It completely alters the perception of reality. You don’t know what’s real anymore.”

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Kurt Andersen is the co-founder of Spy Magazine, the author of several books, and the host of Studio 360.

“As a young person, I never thought of myself as a risk-taker. Then I did this risky thing that shouldn't have succeeded, I started this magazine. And it did encourage me to think, ‘Eh, how bad can it be if it fails? Sometimes these long shots work. So fuck it, try it.’”

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David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His new book is Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.

“The more stories I reported over time, the more I just realized there are parts of the story I can’t always get to. You know, unless this is a reality show and there’s 18 cameras in every room, and people [talk] before they sleep, and maybe you have some mind-bug in their brain for their unconscious, there are just parts you’re just not gonna know. You get as close as you can. And so the struggle to me is to get as close as I can, to peel it back as close as I can, but understanding that there will be elements, there will be pieces, that will remain lingering doubts.”

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Reeves Wiedeman is a reporter at New York.

“I think the main reason I love the job is reporting. And the fact that you get to go out into situations that you wouldn’t otherwise as your job. I’m someone who gets antsy if I’m just on a vacation sitting around. I’d much rather go somewhere weird and kind of have a purpose. So, just feeling like you can kind of go anywhere and see anything and talk to anyone is a pretty cool way to live your day.”

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Renata Adler is a journalist, critic, and novelist. Her nonfiction collection is After the Tall Timber.

“Unless you're going to be fairly definite, what's the point of writing?”

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Margaret Sullivan is the public editor of The New York Times.

“Jill Abramson said to me early on, ‘What will happen here is you’ll stick around and eventually you’ll alienate everybody, and then no one will be talking to you, and you’ll have to leave.’ I’m about three-quarters of the way there.”

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Allison P. Davis is a staff writer at The Cut and New York.

“I have no real advice other than don’t fuck it up and be afraid all the time. That’s the key to success. Don’t fuck it up. Be a little bit anxious all the time.”

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Craig Mod is a writer and photographer who has two newsletters, Roden and Ridgeline. His new book is Things Become Other Things.

“There'll be days where … I’m doing a walk and I'll just be like, I don't know what is going to move me today. And then out of the blue, there'll be this small interaction that when you really pay attention to it, it contains kind of this universe of kindness and patience that you otherwise pass by or ignore. If you're in the general mode of looking at things and then being able to take that experience and try to transmute it into an essay for the evening and send it out, it just develops your eye. You just start being able to look more and more and more closely.”

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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Casey Newton writes the Platformer newsletter. Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for The New York Times. Together they co-host the podcast Hard Fork.

CN: “People actually like to be a little bit confused. They like listening to things where people are talking about things they don’t quite understand, which was very counterintuitive to me. I think a lot of editor-types would scoff at, but I’ve come around.”

KR: “We can revisit subjects and we do. We can change our minds. Print pieces feel so permanent, they feel so definitive. Podcasts, we can just sort of say, ‘I don't know what to make of this, ask me again in a month.’”