Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and founder of the nonprofit Freedom Reads. His New York Times Magazine article "Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out" won the National Magazine Award. His new podcast is Almost There.

“I felt like I had to own becoming something and intuitively understood that if I didn't lay claim to desiring to be something, that it would be too many other forces that would be pulling on me to dictate that I become something else. … When you say you're a writer, if you know nothing else, then you know that you read. You pay attention to the world. … And prison became the metaphor by which I understood the world and poetry became the medium by which I understood what it meant to write about the world and what it meant to take seriously the responsibility to write about the world that I knew.”

Molly Young is a freelance writer for GQ and New York.

"Writing a celebrity profile puts you in a position that no human being wants to be in: you are speaking with somebody, you know that they're lying to you, and you know that they know that they're lying to you. That's just the most humiliating position—it violates any human instinct for maintaining dignity."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode!

For the first time, Janet Reitman discusses her Rolling Stone cover story on accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

"My editors, myself, a lot of people who work for the magazine — we lived through an act of terrorism. We know what it feels like. There have been accusations to me personally of being insensitive, and I can tell you that I'm far from insensitive, not only to the political realities of terrorism but to the personal realities of terrorism. I breathed it in, literally. … The cover elicited an emotional response from people; that is not always what magazine covers do. I think it's great on a certain level, because terrorism is emotional, it's real, it affects us. It is not something that happens just overseas or just to people who are somehow "Other." If you talk to terrorism experts around the world, what they will all say is that the vast majority of people who are involved in these violent, extremist acts are what we would consider otherwise to be very normal people. One of us. Part of our community. That's a reality, and it's a very emotional thing and it makes people very uncomfortable. I totally understand that. But that was the point of my story."

Thanks to this week's sponor, Squarespace.

Ashley C. Ford is a writer and host of the podcast Fortune Favors the Bold. Her memoir, Somebody's Daughter, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.

“For the first time I felt like I had so many more choices in my life than I originally thought I had. That was my first realization that I did not just have to react to the world, that I could be intentional in the world, and just curious about what came back to me.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of The Skies Belong to Us.

"It was this big review in The New York Times and I was terrified that it was going to say something awful about the book or about me as a writer. And my son said to me — he's 5, I should say — "If it's bad, you won't die." That's a good point, you know? So I always think of that when I pick up a new review and take that risk of someone slamming something that I've genuinely poured my heart and soul into. You'll live to fight another day."

Thanks to TinyLetter and the The Literary Reportage concentration at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute for sponsoring this week's episode.

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Jerry Saltz is a Pulitzer-winning art critic for New York.

“To this day I wake up early and I have to get to my desk to write almost immediately. I mean fast. Before the demons get me. I got to get writing. And once I’ve written almost anything, I’ll pretty much write all day, I don’t leave my desk, I have no other life. I’m not part of the world except when I go to see shows.”

Thanks to MailChimp, TapeACall, The Dream, Squarespace, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the host of A Slight Change of Plans.

”I am a type A person through and through. I love having the five-year plan and the ten-year plan, and mapping it all out. By nature, that's what I'm like. And I think the series of pivots that my life has naturally taken, or I've had to take, has kind of soured me on that whole way of thinking. […] Maybe it's also that I'm a more grateful person than I used to be. Like, I feel more gratitude, and so part of my orientation now is, well, how lucky am I that I even stumbled upon something?”

Javier Zamora is the author of Unaccompanied, a poetry collection, and Solito, a memoir.

“There was something that I felt eating away at me, which made me a very angry and volatile teenager. And I think I was an angry teenager because I had this trauma that nobody around me could talk about, and that I didn't have the right therapist to help me unpack. So the cheapest thing that I had was poetry.”

Jazmine Hughes is an associate editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and The New Republic.

“You hope that one day when you’re the editor-in-chief of Blah Blah Blah that you’ll wake up and be like, ‘Okay, I deserve my job.’ But so far I haven’t met anyone who has told me that they feel that way. But, I will say, I don’t talk to white men a lot.”

Thanks to MailChimp, MasterClass, and The Great Courses Plus for sponsoring this week's episode.

Theo Baker is the investigations editor at The Stanford Daily. The first college student ever to win a George Polk Award, Baker received a special recognition for uncovering allegations that pioneering research co-authored by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a renowned neuroscientist, was supported in part by manipulated imagery.

“It’s useful to intellectualize it because when you actually get going, this is something that keeps me up at night. … It’s the last thing I think about when I go to sleep, and the first thing on my mind when I wake up.”

This is the first in a week-long series of conversations with winners of this year's George Polk Awards in Journalism.

Sarah Schweitzer is a former feature writer for the Boston Globe.

“I just am drawn, I think, to the notion that we start out as these creatures that just want love and were programmed that way—to try to find it and to make our lives whole. We are, as humans, so strong in that way. We get knocked down, and adults do some horrible things to us because adults have had horrible things done to [them]. There are some terrible cycles in this world. But there’s always this opportunity to stop that cycle. And there are people who come along who do try that in their own flawed ways.”

Thanks to MailChimp and AlarmGrid for sponsoring this week's episode.

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.”

Brin-Jonathan Butler has written for SB Nation, ESPN, and The New York Times. His new book is A Cuban Boxer’s Journey.

"He smiled at me and just to make small talk, I said, 'You know, you’ve got this gold grill on your teeth. Where did you get that from?' And he said, 'Oh, I just melted my gold medals into my mouth.' And I thought, 'I think I’ve got a story here.'"

Thanks to TinyLetter, WW Norton & Company and Open Road Integrated Media for sponsoring this week's episode.

Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist whose coverage of the drug war in the Philippines has appeared in Rappler, Esquire, and elsewhere. Her recent book is Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country.

“It is hard to describe the beat I do without saying very often it involves people who have died. And it seemed like an unfair way to frame it. It didn't quite seem right. … Sometimes there's no dead body, or sometimes there's 6,000, but the function is the same: that the people you speak to have gone through enormous painful trauma, and then there's a way to cover it that minimizes that trauma. So … I don't cover the dead. I cover trauma.”

Jamie Loftus is a comedian, writer, and podcaster. Her new book is Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs.

“Comedy has been super helpful to me because it's so based on failing every night sometimes that I wasn't afraid of failure in the same way because it's just like, Well, that's going to happen to me at some point this week. Why not in this format?”

Sean Fennessy is the editor-in-chief of The Ringer and a former Grantland editor. He hosts The Big Picture.

"What I try to do is listen to people as much as I can. And try to be compassionate. I think it’s really hard to be on the internet. This is an internet company, in a lot of ways. We have a documentary coming out that’s going to be on linear television that’s really exciting. Maybe we’ll have more of those. But for the moment, podcast, writing, video: it’s internet. [The internet] is an unmediated space of angst and meanness and a willingness to tell people when they’re bad, even when they’ve worked hard on something. That’s like the number one anxiety that I feel like we’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis with everybody, myself included."

Thanks to MailChimp, Mubi, and "Dear Franklin Jones" for sponsoring this week's episode.

Leon Neyfakh is a writer and the host of Slow Burn.

“We didn’t want to be coy about why we were doing the show. We wanted to be up front. We’re interested in this era because it seems like the last time in our nation’s history where things were this wild and the news was this rapid fire and the outcome was this uncertain. That was the main parallel we were thinking about when we started. It was only when we started learning the story and identified the turning points we kept running into these obvious parallels. We mostly didn’t lean into them. We didn’t chase them. There wasn’t a quota of parallels per episode.”

Thanks to MailChimp, MUBI, and Thermacell for sponsoring this week's episode. Also: Longform Podcast t-shirts are now available for a limited time only!

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, author, and host of the podcasts Work Life and Re: Thinking. His new book is Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.

“If you only focus on your own interest, you tend to develop novel ideas, but not necessarily useful ideas. And so for me, the audience is a filter. … I might have 30 ideas for a book. Let me hone in on the four or five that also might be relevant to other people. The goal there is to make a contribution.”