Chip Kidd is a book designer and author. His most recent book is Only What's Necessary: Charles M. Schulz and the Art of Peanuts.

“The curious thing about doing a book cover is that you're creating a piece of art, but it is in service to a greater piece of art that is dictating what you're going to do. I may think I've come up with the greatest design in the world, but if the author doesn't like it, they win. And I have to start over.”

Thanks to The Standard Hotels, MailChimp, Mack Weldon, Prudential, The Great Courses Plus, and "The Message" for sponsoring this week's episode.

Charlie Warzel is a senior tech writer for BuzzFeed.

“Part of the big tech reckoning that we’re seeing since the election isn’t really about the election, it isn’t really about Trump or politics. It’s more about this idea that: Wow, these services have incredibly real consequences in our everyday lives. I think that realization is really profound and is going to shape how we try to figure out what it means to be online from here on out. To keep stories relevant, we have to keep that in mind and try to figure out how to speak to that audience and guide them through that reckoning.”

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Sheila Heti is the author of seven books. Her latest is Motherhood: A Novel.

“[My parents] were afraid for me. As anybody who has a kid who wants to be a writer. I think they understood it was a hard life. It was a life in which you wouldn’t necessarily make enough money. It was a life in which you might be setting yourself up for a great amount of disappointment. My dad’s father was a painter, so there was in him this idea that it wasn’t so crazy to him. It wasn’t so outside his understanding. And, yeah, my mom thought it was a bad idea. And it probably is a bad idea in a lot of ways, but my dad was supportive but also cautioning. I think the book really moved [my mom] and really had an effect on her, so maybe you understand that it’s not necessarily a frivolous thing to be doing. Maybe it’s not just playing. I think my mom always had this idea that writing is playing, and it is playing, but it’s a serious kind of playing.”

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Josh Levin is the national editor at Slate. He is the host of the podcast Hang Up and Listen and the author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth.

“I think it’s a strength to make a thing, one that people might have thought was familiar, feel strange. And reminding people - in general, in life - that you don’t really know as much as you think you know. I think that carries over into any kind of storytelling.”

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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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Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg are the co-authors of the new book I Got A Monster: The Rise and Fall of America's Most Corrupt Police Squad.

“We really wanted to create some kind of leftist, anti-racist true crime story that we really haven’t seen. The conventions of the thriller often smuggle in all of this really right-wing, pro-police propaganda that all of our cops were raised on—the story of cops having to crash cars and break rules in order to get the bad guys. We wanted to take that and subvert it, using its methods to blow it up from the inside while also being rigorously reported.”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic. His latest cover story is "The Case for Reparations."

"The writer hopes for change, but writers can't assume that their work is going to cause change."

Thanks to TinyLetter and I Am Zlatan, the international bestseller published by Random House, for sponsoring this week's episode.

A look back at some of our favorite moments from the first 99.

Thanks to our sponsors, TinyLetter and Squarespace.

Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent and National Magazine Award winner.

"I find it satisfying to be able to give a voice to people that sort of get lost…You know, when these big horrible things happen, and the spotlight is very briefly on them, and then it moves away, and it's not that I'm dragging them out and forcing them to 'Relive your horrible moments!' It's more a thing of, 'If you'd like to relive your horrible moment, if you want people to know what actually happened, talk to me. I will tell your story.'"

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

Joshuah Bearman is the co-founder of Epic Magazine and a freelance writer. His latest story is "Coronado High."

"People who know me well will realize that parts of this story are actually about me. … It's about loss of innocence and getting to a certain point in your life where you realize the excitement of youth is over. Life at a certain point gets complicated and there are consequences and things get hard. These are people who dealt with those consequences in a way that I never did — they had to go to prison or destroy their friends lives — but that's what I liked about this story. It's a true crime story, but it became universal when I realized that there is this emotional experience that these characters go through that anybody can relate to."

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Ed Caesar is a freelance writer based in England whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, British GQ, and The Sunday Times Magazine. He is the author of Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon.

“That was a really horrific situation. People were being killed in the street in front of us. People were firing weapons in all directions. It was really chaotic and quite scary. It freaked me out. And I thought, ‘Actually, there's not a huge amount more of this I want to do in my life.’”

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Kliph Nesteroff writes for WFMU's Beware of the Blog. His book, The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy, was released in November.

“Well, comedy always becomes stale. Whether it’s offensive or not offensive, it has an expiry date, unfortunately. A lot of people don’t want to hear this because that means a lot of their favorite comedians suddenly become irrelevant. But that’s the history of comedy: the hippest, coolest guy today—whoever that is to you in comedy—50 years from now, the new generation is going to say, ‘That guy’s not funny, and he’s square.’ And they’re going to say, ‘This new young guy is funny.’ But in another 50 years that guy becomes the square who isn’t funny. And it’s not that they weren’t funny and everybody was wrong; it was that that person was relating to their time.”

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Scott Anderson is a war correspondent and novelist. He’s written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, and more.

“I really feel that what’s at the root of so many wars now, modern wars, unconventional wars, it really just comes down to a bunch of young guys with access to guns coming up with a pretext to rape and murder and pillage and steal from their neighbors.”

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Ben Taub is a staff 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.”

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Michael Idov is a screenwriter, journalist, and the former editor-in-chief of GQ Russia. His latest book is Dressed Up for a Riot.

"It just goes to show that the best thing you can possibly do as a journalist is to forget you’re a journalist, go out, have some authentic experiences, preferably fail at something really hard, and then write about that."

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Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and a co-host of Political Gabfest. Her latest book is Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration.

“I'm pretty convinced that if everybody went to criminal court we would not have courts that are dysfunctional the way our courts are. Because what you see every day is a lot of dysfunction and disrespect. It’s kind of deadening. Most people—especially most middle and upper-class people in this country—don’t know anything about the system. They haven’t experienced it first-hand and they prefer not to think about it. It’s very stigmatized. A lot of what I do is just bear witness.’”

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Emily Oster is an economist, professor, and author. Her new book is The Family Firm.

”[COVID] has been 18 months of being a person who is slightly more public, who is saying things that are somewhat more controversial, where people yell at me a lot. ... I do much less reading of the comments than I did early on because I found that eventually I just got mad and that's not a productive way to interact. And it affects how I think about what I write, and I would like what I write to be the things that I think are true, not the things I think will avoid people being angry.”

Sam Sanders is the former host of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. He hosts Vulture’s Into It, which launched last week.

“I don’t think I ever wanted a career where I was doing the same thing for 30 years. I think that, editorially, I had become someone who was really contemplating what kind of capital-j journalist I wanted to be, want to be, and I was questioning a lot of rules and the structure of what we think journalism is supposed to be, and I think I needed to be away from a legacy institution like NPR, at least for a spell, to work that out.”

Jackie MacMullan is an NBA journalist who has written for The Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated and ESPN. She hosts the podcast Icons Club for The Ringer.

“[Athletes] think they don't need journalists—and they're wrong. And I tell them all this. I'm like, ‘I know you think you've got your own production company, but we can tell your story better than you can.' That's just the truth. No one tells their own story the best. It's the people around them that tell the story the best. And nobody wants a whitewashed version of you. They want warts and all. That's what makes you lovable. That's what makes you interesting. ... There are great journalists out there that can tell your story—and it might not be exactly the way you want it to be told, but it'll have weight and it'll have legacy to it.”

Jake Halpern has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine and is a contributor to This American Life. His latest book is Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld.

"I test out my stories on my kids. You should be able to tell any story, now matter how complicated, to a seven-year-old in a way that they understand. If you can't, that probably means that either a) you're telling the story wrong or b) it's not really a story."

Thanks to TinyLetter and Bonobos for sponsoring this week's episode.

Steve Kandell is the longform editor at BuzzFeed.

"What would be the sort of longer, narrative nonfiction, journalistic equivalent of something that would have the same effect on you as a bunch of cat GIFs? And not because it's cute, but it's the kind of thing that makes you go, 'OK, I need a lot of other people to see this.'"

Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode.

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Wil S. Hylton, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Vanished.

"I despise the fucking nut graf. I think it's a joke, a cop out. The story probably should be about something larger than itself but if you have to tell people what that is, you've failed from the beginning. If they can't find it, you didn't put it there and you shouldn't be beating them over the head with it."

Thanks to TinyLetter and The Fog Horn for sponsoring this week's episode, and to the Writing Department at the University of Pittsburgh for hosting.

Erik Larson is the author of several books, including The Devil in the White City. His latest is Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.

"I realized then and there, that afternoon: the thing that was going to make this interesting was the juxtaposition of light and dark, good and evil. This monument to civic goodwill versus this monument to the dark side of human nature. ... But that was really hard to pull off. And, frankly, on the eve of publication I was pretty convinced my career was over. I'd violated every single concept of good narrative."

Thanks to TinyLetter, Wealthfront, and Love and Other Ways of Dying, the new collection from Michael Paterniti, for sponsoring this week's episode. If you would like to support the show, please leave a review on iTunes.

A.J. Daulerio is the former editor-in-chief of Gawker.

“The choices they’ve given me are take back everything that you loved about Nick [Denton], Gawker, and your job, and we’ll give you your $1,000 back or your ability to make money. You can walk away from this, but you just can’t talk about it ever again. I don’t see there’s any question for me. I definitely thought long and hard about it, and I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. It’s just not in me. Some days I absolutely wish I could say, ‘Is there a phone call I could make to make this all go away?’ Because I want my life back. That’s happened. But for the most part I just think I would regret doing that.”

Thanks to MailChimp, EA SPORTS FIFA 17, School of the Arts Institute of Chicago, Casper, and Texture for sponsoring this week's episode.

Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer who writes for Businessweek, The Verge, Racked, The New Yorker, and more.

“I love that idea of form and content being the same. I want to write about lifestyle in a lifestyle magazine. I want to critique technology in the form of technology, and kind of have the piece be this infiltrating force that explodes from within or whatever. You want something that gets into the space, and sneaks in, and then blows up.”

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