Ira Glass is the host and executive producer of This American Life. “You can only have so many questions about feelings, I think. At some point people are just like alright, enough with the feelings.” Thanks to MailChimp, EA SPORTS FIFA 16, Fracture, an

Peter Hessler is a staff writer for The New Yorker. “It may have helped that I didn’t have a lot of ideas about China. You know, it was sort of a blank slate in my mind. …I wasn’t a reporter when I went to Fuling, but I was thinking like a reporter or ev

Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has written for The New York Times, Newsweek, and Harper's. Her latest book is Negroland: A Memoir. “One of the problems with—burdens of—‘race conversations’ in this country is certain ideological, political, soc

Renata Adler is a journalist, critic, and novelist. Her latest collection of nonfiction is After the Tall Timber. “Unless you're going to be fairly definite, what's the point of writing?” Thanks to MailChimp, and Squarespace for sponsoring this week's e

S.L. Price is a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. “The fact is, if you write about sports and people think they're just reading about sports, they'll read about drug use. They'll read about sex. They'll read about sex change. They'll read about commun

William Finnegan is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. “I suppose in retrospect I was just trying to find out what the world held that nobody could tell me about until I got there. I was a big reader and had a cou

Tim Ferriss is the author of The Four Hour Workweek and The Four Hour Body. “If you have a fitness magazine, you can’t just write one issue, ‘Here are the rules!’ ... My job, conversely, is to make myself obsolete. The last thing I want to be is a guru,

Carol Loomis retired last summer after 60 years at Fortune. She continues to edit Warren Buffett's annual report. “Writing itself makes you realize where there are holes in things. I’m never sure what I think until I see what I write. And so I believe th

Noreen Malone wrote "Cosby: The Women — An Unwanted Sisterhood," this week's cover story in New York. “We interviewed them all separately, and that was what was so striking: they all kept saying the same thing, down to the details of what they say Cosby

Ian Urbina, an investigative reporter for The New York Times, just published "The Outlaw Ocean," a four-part series on crime in international waters. “It is a tribe. It has its norms, its language, and its jealousies. I approached it almost as a foreign

Margaret Sullivan is the public editor of The New York Times. “Jill Abramson said to me early on, ‘What will happen here is you’ll stick around and eventually you’ll alienate everybody, and then no one will be talking to you, and you’ll have to leave.’ I

Tavi Gevinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Rookie. "I just want our readers to know that they are already smart enough and cool enough." Thanks to our sponsor, TinyLetter. Show notes: @tavitulle Rookie thestylerookie.com [4:00] "Tavi Says"

Ross Andersen is the deputy editor of Aeon Magazine. “One of the things that’s been really refreshing in dealing with scientists—as opposed to say politicians or most business people—is that scientists are wonderfully candid, they’ll talk shit on their c

Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, writes for The New York Times and is the editorial director of Fusion. “I think that Jezebel contributed to what I now call ‘outrage culture,’ but outrage culture has no sense of humor. We had a hell of a sens

James Verini, a freelance writer based out of Nairobi, won the 2015 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. “That is probably the most alien, jarring thing about working in Africa: life is much cheaper. More to the point, death is very close to you.

Rembert Browne is a staff writer at Grantland. “I'm ok with not being at my most refined online. It's happening in real time and some of that is therapeutic. I could write a lot this stuff privately, but I'd rather just hit publish and see what happens.

Ashlee Vance covers technology for Bloomberg Businessweek and is the author of of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. “To be totally clear, I don’t cover them (apps). I like people who try to solve big problems. Wherever I go,

Cheryl Strayed is the author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. “There's a long history, of women especially, saying 'Well, I just got lucky.' I didn't just get lucky. I worked my fucking ass off. And then I got lucky. And if I hadn't worked my ass off,

Masha Gessen has written for The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and others. Her book about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy, came out in April. “The moment she said it, it was obvious

Sarah Maslin Nir, a reporter for The New York Times, recently published an exposé of labor practices in the nail salons of New York. “The idea of a discount luxury is an oxymoron. And it’s an oxymoron for a reason: because someone is bearing the cost of

Stephen J. Dubner is the co-author, with Steven D. Levitt, of Freakonomics. Their latest book, When to Rob a Bank, came out last week. “I’ve abandoned more books than I’ve written, which I’m happy about. I’m very pro-quitting. We get preached this idea t

George Quraishi is the co-founder and editor of Howler. “We raised $69,001. And that paid for the first issue. I call it subsistence magazine making, because every issue pays for the next one.” Thanks to TinyLetter, Squarespace, The Great Courses, and A

Andy Greenwald covers television for Grantland. “People are enthusiastic about TV. People want to read about it. They want to talk about it. They want to know more. They want to extend its presence in their lives. People used to talk about the water cool

Alexis Okeowo, a foreign correspondent, has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Businessweek. “Nigeria is a deeply sexist country. It can be difficult for people to take you seriously. But that also has its benefits, because it’s

Rachel Syme has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Grantland, and more. “You have this sense that you’re bonding, but at the same time you're also going to betray them. Because if you hear this quote that they say or you see it in a manneris