Alex Blumberg is a former producer for This American Life and Planet Money. Last year he founded Gimlet Media, a podcast network, and hosts its first show, StartUp.

“When someone starts talking about something difficult, when they get unexpectedly emotional, your normal human reaction is to sort of comfort and steer away. To say, ‘Oh I’m sorry, let’s move on.’ What you need to do, if you want good tape, is to say, ‘Talk more about how you’re feeling right now.’ It feels like a horrible question to ask. It feels like you're going against your every instinct as a decent human being to go toward the pain that this person is experiencing.”

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Josh Dean has written for GQ, Fast Company, New York, and more. His latest piece, "The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang," was just published by The Atavist.

“I sort of reject the whole idea of something being beneath me. There are obviously some stories I wouldn’t do or that I have no interest in, but this job is fun and should be fun. And I wouldn’t turn something down that seems like a fun thing for me to do just because maybe the story is not something that 10,000 people are going to tweet about. I don’t give a shit.”

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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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Bryan Fogel is the Oscar-winning director of Icarus.

“But there was a long period of time also that none of us were really thinking so much about the film. It was really that we were in a real world crisis. Gregory's life was essentially in my hands.”

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Adam Higginbotham has written for Businessweek, Wired and The New Yorker. His latest story is A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, for The Atavist.

"There's always a narrative in a crime story. Something has always gone wrong. These guys are always in prison, because they all fucked something up or trusted the wrong person. They always get caught in the end. Because if they hadn't, you wouldn't be reading about it."

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Jake Silverstein is editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly.

"Texas is not a frontier in the same way it was 150 years ago, but it still has a frontier mentality. And that's definitely true from a journalistic standpoint. ... You have more of a feeling that you're figuring things out for yourself. Which means that you make more mistakes, but you also have a little bit more leeway and freedom to find a certain path down here than you would if you were surrouded by other magazines and media companies."</i>

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Patrick Symmes is a foreign correspondent and contributor to Outside and Harper's.

"They rolled us up like a cheap carpet. We were locked in a room for 14 hours. And for the first six hours that was okay. Everything was nice; there was coffee. But then the nightshift came on. You could hear gunshots in the street, and these guys were scared. And they were thugs. And they were thugs with a mission: to get rid of every foreigner who might witness what was happening."</i>

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Ann Friedman is a writer, editor and co-founder of Tomorrow.

"The notion of kissing up is super weird to me. You should always be kissing down and sideways, to the people who are going to be working alongside you and coming up behind you. I'm really aware of my impending irrelevance. ... I'm waiting for that day when I'm in dire need of work and 65 years old—because none of us are retiring, obviously—and I don't understand how to write on Google Glass or whatever we're composing on then. I want there to be some journalist who remembers when I got on the phone with her in 2013 and helped her negotiate for her first salary and throws me a fucking bone. I think about that moment a lot."</i>

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George Saunders has written for The New Yorker and GQ. His latest collection of short stories is Tenth of December.

“Maybe you would understand your artistry to be: put me anywhere. I'll find human beings, I'll find human interest, I'll find literature. And I guess you could argue the weirder, or maybe the less explored the place, the better.”

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Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the author of the new book, Just Us: An American Conversation.

“I began to wonder, why am I maintaining civility around things that are actually very important to me? This might be the only chance I get to stand up for myself. As Claudia. As a Black person. As a Black woman. As an American citizen. So what am I waiting for? What am I preserving when the thing I am supposedly preserving is also the thing that is on some level killing me?”

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Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN. His new book is Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last.

“If you’re going to write a profile of someone … you have to find some piece of common ground with them so that no matter how famous or good or noble or bad—or no matter how cartoonish their most well-known attributes are—it shrinks them. And once they’re small enough to fit in your hand, I think it changes the entire experience of asking questions about their lives.”

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Jessica Lessin is founder and editor-in-chief of The Information.

“It's very, very hard to predict the winners. A lot of investors try to do this. And I think sometimes where the press gets in trouble is trying to make a call.… It's not always our job to say this thing is doomed or not. I think many journalists, unfortunately, are more interested in that than in understanding, What is this company trying to do?”

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Joshua Yaffa is a correspondent for The New Yorker, the author of Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia, and has been reporting from Ukraine for the last several weeks. His most recent article is "What the Russian Invasion Has Done to Ukraine."

“I’m not at all a conflict reporter. I don't like it, though who would like being in these situations? But this is the story, right? If you cover this part of the world, if the war in 2014 felt like the tectonic plates of history were shifting, now they're just erupting, crashing. This is the asteroid-impact event for this part of the world with effects that will last similarly long going forward.”

Joseph Cox is a cybersecurity journalist and co-founder of 404 Media. His new book is Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever.

“In the not too distant future, I will be a very old man, and maybe I won't be able to spend all day talking to drug traffickers. I will be mentally and physically exhausted. So I will doggedly pursue the story right now while I can.”

Adrian Chen is a staff writer at Gawker and editor at The New Inquiry.

"I've never written a magazine feature. [My writing is] similar, in that I try to bring in the bigger issues, and not just, you know, be funny or tell a sensational story. But I think it's also kind of rough and sketchy in the way that blog posts are. Longform blog writing is like, I don't spend a long time editing or looking it over. It's like, just type as fast as you can and try to cram all of your research in, and then it goes up."

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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.”