Anita Hill is a professor and author. Her new book is Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.

"I really do feel that my life now has purpose. And my responsibility really is to live out that purpose as much as possible. The reason that this isn’t entirely daunting is that I realize I am one individual. And that the issues will not depend on me entirely. … But I also realize that every person who has the opportunity should be involved, and that includes me."

George Saunders is the author of eleven books. His latest is A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life.

”I really have so much affection for being alive. I really enjoy it. And yet, I’m a little negative minded in a lot of ways too, like I really think things tend to be fucked up. ... To get that on the page—to sufficiently praise the loveliness of the world without being a sap, and also lacerate the world for being so goddamn mean—to do those in the same story would be a great aspiration. And I haven’t gotten there yet.”

Kara Swisher is the executive editor and co-founder of Recode.

“I do the work. I just work harder than other people. I really do. I work harder, I interview more people, I call more people, I text more people. And so I find out, and they can not talk to me — fine. I know anyway. I’d like to talk to you, I’d like to give you a chance. I’d like to be fair. I’d like to hear your side of the story. And the most important thing is, I think smart people – and these are very smart people — like smart questions. They don’t like the fawning questions. They don’t like being licked up and down all day. Some of the day they like it. They want someone who knew them before they were billionaires. Because when you’re a billionaire, every day you’re so smart. Everyone wants something from you.”

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Michael Lewis has written for The New Republic, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is Flash Boys.

“When you're telling a story, you're essentially playing the cards you're dealt. ... Sometimes the hand is very easy to play. Sometimes the hand is difficult to play. At the end, I just try to think, ‘Is there anything I would have done differently?‘ ‘Is there any trick I missed?’ If I don't have the feeling that I missed something big, I feel happy about the book.”

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E. Alex Jung is a senior writer for Vulture and New York. 

”When I'm in that space, I try to be a sponge. I'll just absorb whatever's happening or going on, and I'll be down to do mostly anything. I was actually thinking recently about what my limits would be in a profile. I was like—heroin? I don't think I would do that.”

Joe Bernstein is a senior reporter for BuzzFeed News.

“The question of disinformation is almost an attempt to create a new mythology around why people act the way they do. I don’t mean to say that it’s some kind of nefarious plot. ... It’s a natural, or a convenient explanation. And that’s why I think it caught on for some time anyway.”

Amy Wallace is an editor-at-large for Los Angeles and a correspondent for GQ .

"I've written about the anti-vaccine movement. I love true crime. I've written a lot of murder stories. The thing that unites all of them—whether it's a celebrity profile or a biologist who murdered a bunch of people or Justin Timberlake—it's almost trite to say, but there's a humanity to each of these people. And figuring out what's making them tick in the moment, or in general, is interesting to me. In a way, that's my sweet spot."

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David Samuels is a contributing editor at Harper's and contributor to The New Yorker and The Atlantic.

"You start by doing the thing you want to do, at whatever level you can. There's this idea that you work your way up by writing captions, and then capsule film reviews or whatever, and I don't think it works that way. I think you learn to master a form, and you start by doing the thing you want to do. At first you're not going to do it as well as you wish you could, and then you learn. At the same time, I think, there's so much dreck, and there's so many people who don't care about doing the thing well, that when that kid walks in your door and they want to do the thing, you say 'Sure,' because it doesn't cost you anything, you look at it, and there's actually some energy on the page, like, yeah, it's bad, but it's bad in a different way. It's bad in the way of someone who might eventually be good."

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Aleksandar Hemon is a writer from Bosnia whose fiction and non-fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Granta. His books include The Lazarus Project, The Question of Bruno, and The Book of My Lives.

“For me and for everyone I know, that's the central fact of our lives. It's the trauma that we carry, that we cannot be cured of. The way things are in Bosnia, it's far from over. It's not peace, it's the absence of war. It's always there as a possibility. There's no way to imagine anything beyond a society defined by war.”

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Kevin Kelly is a writer and a founding executive editor of Wired Magazine. He is the author of What Technology Wants, Out of Control and The Inevitable: Understanding the Twelve Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

“I always try to write about the future—and it became harder and harder because things would catch up so fast. If you read Out of Control now, I’ve heard that people say, ‘well, this is obvious.’ I have to tell you, it was dismissed as entirely pie-in-the-sky, wild-eyed craziness twenty-five years ago.”

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Andrea Bernstein is a journalist and co-host of Trump, Inc., a podcast from WNYC and ProPublica. Her new book is American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power.

“Hope is an action. And I feel that writing and documenting is an action. When I stop doing those things, I will be hopeless. But because I am still doing those things, it means that I still have hope… so long as we continue to be actors in the world, we can be hopeful human beings.”

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Donovan X. Ramsey is a journalist and author of the new book When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era.

“I've only ever wanted to write about Black people—and that includes the elements of our lives that are difficult. I’ve always prided myself on being able to metabolize that information and not really be harmed by it. And this book really taught me that writing and processing is not just something that you do in your head. That the information does go through you as you're trying to make sense of it. And it's not happening to you, right? It's not like a direct form of PTSD that you have, but you do experience some trauma when you open up your imagination in that way.”

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.”

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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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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Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and the co-host of Still Processing.

“I think that the taking of extra time to be more thoughtful and less reactive is, to the extent that I have any wisdom to impart, that is it. Just wait a second. Because someone’s going to get there before you get there anyway.”

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is an author and journalist. He served as guest editor for the September issue of Vanity Fair, titled "The Great Fire."

“There’s this pressure to say something. Say something. The world’s burning, say something. But I try to stay where I’ve been or where I’ve tried to be in my career. ... Good things take time. You gotta let things cook. You can’t insta-bake something like this.”

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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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Donovan X. Ramsey is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in GQ, WSJ Magazine, The Atlantic, and many other publications.

“I actually got into writing about criminal justice ... because I was curious about Black life. But that meant the only way I was able to do that was I had to kind of do this really often depressing slice of Black life. And there’s so much more. And there’s so much beauty in the lived experiences of Black people. … There are so many stories that just never get told about Black life. One, I have a connection to being a Black person, but then being a Black person who has the benefit of a really good education, and I’ve been given some shots here and there… it feels like a duty. If I’m not going to tell these stories, then who?”

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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.”

Leslie Jamison has written for The Believer, Harper's and The New York Times. Her latest book is The Empathy Exams.

"I sort of love imagining a small army of 22-year-old men who are just like, 'Fuck that book, I wish it was never published.'"

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Natasha Vargas-Cooper has written for GQ, Spin and BuzzFeed.

"Writing is the worst part of this gig for me. I hate sitting down and writing; it's being with my worst self. … But then, when it's over, it's the best. I have no greater joy than reading what I've published—with the exception of some editors who have fucked up my shit."</i>

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Will Mackin is a U.S. Navy veteran who served with a SEAL team in Iraq and Afghanistan. His debut book is Bring Out the Dog.

“I wanted to write nonfiction and I started writing nonfiction. And the reason I did that was — first of all, I felt all the people did all the hard work, and who was I to take liberties? And the second reason was, I just felt an obligation to the men and women who I served with not to misrepresent them, or what they’d been through, or what it had meant to them, or how they felt about it. I kept piling these requirements on to myself: Well, if I present this particular event in this light, this guy’s going to get his feelings hurt. Or, I don’t know how this guy’s family will feel about me talking about this. And it became debilitating, all those restrictions, I kind of kept layering on myself. I was talking to George Saunders at one point about this, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this book is going to happen. I’m just stuck’ And he pointed out, ‘You’re putting all these restrictions on yourself because it puts this perfect book off in the never-to-reach future. If you remove those and start fictionalizing things and getting at it a different way, maybe it’ll work for you.’”

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Lena Dunham, the creator and star of HBO's Girls, is the co-founder of Lenny and the author of Not That Kind of Girl. A special episode hosted by Longform Podcast editor Jenna Weiss-Berman.

“Writing across mediums can be a really healthy way to utilize your energy and stay productive while not feeling entrapped. But at the end of the day, the time when I feel like life is most just, like, flying by and I don't even know what's happening to me is when I'm writing prose. It's such an intimate relationship that you're having. When you're writing a script, you're making a blueprint for something that doesn't exist yet. But when you're writing prose, the thing exists immediately. And that's really satisfying. It's the best place to go for my deepest and most in-the-now concerns.”

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Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

"If I'm writing about the criminal justice system, I wish I were a lawyer. If I'm writing about psychiatry, I wish I were a psychiatrist. I have often filled out half my application to get a Ph.D in clinical psychology. That is one area where I am constantly on the verge of jumping the fence. But even when I wrote about religion, I thought I wanted to be a priest."

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