Mary Childs is a co-host of the podcast Planet Money and the author of The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Lost It All.

“I love aberrations. I love when things go wrong. You get a high stress situation, you get all of the manifestations of personality. We're our most selves, if not our best selves, at those times. I like the [stories] that have embedded in them all of those conduits of power and that reveal the greater system.”

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah has written for The Believer, The LA Review of Books, Transition and The Paris Review. "If He Hollers Let Him Go," her essay on Dave Chappelle, was a 2014 National Magazine Award finalist.

"So the stakes are high. I’m not just writing this to write. I’m writing because I think there’s something I need to say. And there’s something that needs to be said. ... What I hope is that a young kid or an older person will see that you have choices, that you don't have to accept what people hand to you. That you have control."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

Terry Gross is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air.

“Part of my philosophy of life is that you have to live with a certain amount of delusion. And part of the delusion I live with is that maybe, from experience, I’m getting a little bit better. But then the other part of me, the more overpowering part of me, is the pessimistic part that says, ‘It’s going to be downhill from here.’ I try not to judge myself too much because I’m so self-judgmental that I don’t want to over-judge and get into too much of ‘Am I better than I was yesterday, or not?’”

Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, and Blue Apron for sponsoring this week's episode.

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

“I still nurse the idea in my heart of hearts that something you write, that there’s some key to this all. We’re all looking for the skeleton key that’s going to unlock it, and people will go, ‘Oh, that’s why we have to do something!’ I don’t want to say that I completely dispensed with that. I think that’s what motivates most journalists—this information is going to somehow make a difference. On the other hand, I have dispensed a lot of that. Now we’re so deep into all of this. The more you know about climate change and the numbers involved and the scale involved of what we need to do to really mitigate this problem, you know that we’re moving in absolutely the wrong direction. It’s not like we’re moving slowly, we’re moving in the wrong direction. It’s very hard to say anything I write is going to turn this battleship around.”

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

David Wallace-Wells is the deputy editor of New York and the author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.

“Between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees of warming, just that extra half degree of warming, is going to kill 150 million people from air pollution alone. That’s 25 times the death toll of the Holocaust. And when I say that to people, their eyes open. They’re like oh my god, this is suffering on such an unconscionable scale. And it is. But 9 million people are dying already every year from air pollution. That’s a Holocaust every year, right now. And our lives aren’t meaningfully oriented around those people and those deaths. And very few people we know have their lives meaningfully oriented around those people and those deaths. And I think it’s quite likely that, going forward, those impulses of compartmentalization and denial and narcissism will continue to govern our response to this crisis. Which is tragic.”

Thanks to MailChimp, The Great Courses Plus, The Primary Ride Home Podcast, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Jen Percy is the author of Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism.

"As is the nature of obsession, you just start gathering materials, hoarding documents and taking notes in a way that’s totally chaotic and overwhelming. You don’t even care yet because you’re so excited by what you’re gathering. If you start trying to make a narrative out of it too soon it will be false or fall apart."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Dear Thief, the new novel by Samantha Harvey, for sponsoring this week's episode.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is the author of A Sense of Direction.

"My best friend, who is a fiction writer, she once said to me that she saw a lot of the things I was doing as 'wring tenderness from absurdity.' That wouldn't have occurred to me to put it that way, but that does seem to me [what] I like to do ... I am someone who can very easily be dismissive, or even contemptuous. And one of the things I like about reporting a story, particularly reporting a story that is ultimately, counterintuitively, positive, is that it gives me a chance to work through that, and be the more tender, sympathetic person that I would like to be in real life."

Edith Zimmerman is the founding editor of The Hairpin and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.

"I never wrote anything myself or ran anything from other people that was needlessly negative. It wasn't some false grin plastered all over it — we addressed dark things too, and poked fun at things. But I didn't want there to ever be a tone of yeah, let's really just deflate this. Because ultimately you're just stabbing at a ghost among friends. And then at the end you've all just fallen on the floor and the ghost is gone. You're not really doing anything constructive."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

</blockquote>

Andy Ward, a former editor at Esquire and GQ, is the editorial director of nonfiction at Random House.

"How you gain that trust is a hard thing to quantify. The way I try do it is by caring. If you don't care about every word and every sentence in the piece, writers pick up on that. ... Ultimately, it's their book or their magazine article. Their name is on it, not mine. I always try to keep that in mind."

Thanks to this week's sponsors: TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA 14.

Katie J.M. Baker is a reporter for BuzzFeed News.

“I went to Steubenville a year after the sexual assault to cover their first big football game of the season and I was face-to-face with these people who I had been writing about without knowing much about them. From far away it seems like, do these details matter? Do we care if these people’s lives get messed up when the narrative is so strong, when Steubenville now stands for more awareness around rape culture? But when you’re there, of course it matters. After that piece I realized I didn’t want to blog anymore and I wanted to just focus on reporting.”

Thanks to Casper, Scribd, and TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter for Buzzfeed and the author of News Junkie.

“I made the worst mistake that cost me my credibility and I could have done two things. I could have walked away, and said I’m done with this, no one wants me anymore. Or I could have—which I did—say, I’m going to learn how to do this differently, and be better. And that’s ultimately is what paved the way to this FOIA work. Because no one trusted me anymore.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Credible, Mubi, and Skillshare, for sponsoring this week's episode.

Mat Honan is a senior writer at Wired.

"[The tech] industry—especially as it relates to a lot the silly apps and the silly websites and the silly shit that we put up with—is ridiculous. It's just such a hype fest, people living off of jargon and nonsense. There are entire conferences devoted to nonsense! ... I like to skewer that stuff, because I don't want to feel responsible for it. I don't want to feel like I'm making someone go out and buy some piece of shit they don't need."

Thanks to this week's sponsor, TinyLetter!

</blockquote>

Kelley Benham is a writer and editor at the Tampa Bay Times.

"People connect with this story in a really visceral kind of way, usually because of some experience they've had or someone close to them has had. I've had 90-year-old women crying into my phone about babies they lost 70 years ago. I've had people kind of sneak up to me and tell me about babies that have died that they don't talk about, but that they carry with them all the time. I've had premies who are grown up—those are my favorite—you know, "I'm 20 now and I have a scar just like Juniper's scar, and thank you for helping me understand who I am."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

Sarah Nicole Prickett is the founding editor of Adult.

"I'll admit to being resistant to the 'by women for women' label that Adult had before because I saw it as being just 'by women,' period. That’s way more feminist than making something for women, which is very prescriptive and often comes in various shades of pink."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

Latria Graham is a writer living in South Carolina. Her work has appeared in Outside, Garden & Gun, The Guardian, and The New York Times. Her latest essay is "Out There, Nobody Can Hear You Scream."

“My goal as a person—not just as a writer—is to be the adult that I needed when I was younger. That’s why I go and talk to college classes. That’s why I write some of these vulnerable things, to let people that are struggling know that they’re not on their own. … I have to be unmerciful to myself, I think, in order to do it. I really do try to dissect myself and my mistakes. And just kind of say, Here’s the full deck of my life. Take from it what you need. But I’m not holding out on you.”

Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode.

Doree Shafrir is a co-host of podcast Forever35, the former executive editor of Buzzfeed, and the author of the new memoir Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer.

”Right now I can make my living from podcasting, but I don’t know what the advertising market for podcasts is going to look like in five years or even one year. The blog advertising market cratered. So one of the challenges of being my own ‘brand’ is that I always do have to think about, what is the next thing? Because in my experience in media, nothing is ever good for too long.”

Thanks to Mailchimp and The London Review of Books for sponsoring this week's episode.

Gary Smith, a four-time National Magazine Award winner, retired last month after 32 years at Sports Illustrated.

"We were on the Santa Monica Freeway, Ali's driving 70 miles an hour and his eyes are drifting asleep—the medication for Parkinson's would do that to him. I'm thinking, 'Oh, crap.' We're weaving between lanes, cars are honking, and I'm wondering in the passenger seat, 'Should I grab the wheel from the greatest champ of all-time?' The writer in me wants to let it go, let the crash happen just so I get a scene for the story. But the human in me was just getting scared as hell."

Thanks to TinyLetter and EA SPORTS FIFA WORLD CUP for sponsoring this week's episode.

Louisa Thomas, a former writer and editor at Grantland, is a New Yorker contributor and the author of Louisa. Her father Evan Thomas, a longtime writer for Newsweek and Time, is the author of several award-winning books, including last year's Being Nixon.

“That's one thing I've learned from my dad: the capacity to be open to becoming more open.”

Thanks to MailChimp's Freddie and Co. for sponsoring this bonus episode.

Ben Taub is a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

“I don’t think it’s my place to be cynical because I’ve observed some of the horrors of the Syrian War through these various materials, but it’s Syrians that are living them. It’s Syrians that are being largely ignored by the international community and by a lot of political attention on ISIS. And I think that it wouldn’t be my place to be cynical when some of them still aren’t.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Audible, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's episode.

Madeleine Baran is an investigative reporter for APM Reports and the host and lead reporter of the podcast In the Dark.

“We’re always thinking about first not so much the narrative, but first what did we find out and how is it important? And how can we construct a story that’s going to take people along on that and they’re going to care about it and be able to follow it. That’s a challenge in any kind of serialized podcast or film where you have one narrative arc from start to finish in a season, but you also have all these individual episodes with narrative arcs. And because we’re not novelists, we don’t get to change the facts, sometimes there are these facts you do not like cause they’re really confusing and you wish they were not that way. We spend a lot of time in storyboarding and edits and group edits and sound edits. We bring in people who don’t know what we’re doing and have them listen for mostly for clarity and confusion.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Screen Dive podcast, Skagen, Squarespace, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.

Jad Abumrad is the co-creator and host of Radiolab. His latest podcast is Dolly Parton's America.

“There’s a way in which, I think, it felt more honest to be more confused in our stories. So that’s where we went.”

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

Sam Biddle writes for Valleywag.

"It's a lot of overgrown, entitled manchildren pulling price tags out of the ether and passing them around. Considering Silicon Valley worthy of contempt is the first premise that we work from."

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

Matthew Shaer is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, GQ, and The Atavist Magazine.

“I could not turn off the freelance switch in my head. I could not not be thinking about these different types of stories. My Google Alert list looks like a serial killer's.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Squarespace, Howl, and MasterClass for sponsoring this week's episode.

"The kind of stories I've gotten to do have involved fulfilling my childhood fantasies of having an adventurous life. Even though I don't make a ton of money doing it, I've never felt like I was missing out on something."

Matthew Power, a freelance journalist and friend, died on assignment in Uganda on Monday.

Above is Matt's Longform Podcast, recorded in February 2013. Some of our favorite stories from his archive:

Confessions of a Drone Warrior (GQ • Oct 2013)
During his nearly six years in the Air Force, Airman First Class Brandon Bryant flew hundreds of missions and logged almost 6,000 hours of flight time. He killed or helped kill 1,626 people. And he never left Nevada.

Mississippi Drift (Harper's • Mar 2008)
An ill-fated trip down the river with a group of anarchists.

Excuse Us While We Kiss The Sky (GQ • Mar 2013)
Navigating the sewers of London and summiting the peaks of Paris with a group of urban explorers.

Blood in the Sand (Outside • Jan 2014)
Investigating the murder of a Costa Rican conservationist.

One More Martyr in a Dirty War (VQR • Jun 2007)
The life and death of Brad Will.

Lost in the Amazon (Men's Journal • Jun 2009)
One man's absurd quest to become the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon River—floods, electric eels, and machete-wielding natives be damned.