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

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

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His latest book, Between the World and Me, just won the National Book Award. “When I first came to New York, I couldn't see any of this. I felt like a complete washout. I was in my little apa

Kurt Andersen is the co-founder of Spy Magazine, the author of several books, and the host of Studio 360. “As a young person, I never thought of myself as a risk-taker. Then I did this risky thing that shouldn't have succeeded, I started this magazine. A

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

Jazmine Hughes is an associate editor at The New York Times Magazine. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and The New Republic. “You hope that one day when you’re the editor-in-chief of Blah, Blah, Blah, that you’ll wake up an

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 y

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.

John Seabrook is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. “Whether or not the piece succeeds or fails is not going to depend on whether I’m up to the minute on the latest social media spot to hang out or the l

Karina Longworth is a film writer and the creator/host of You Must Remember This, a podcast exploring the secret stories of Hollywood. “For me the thing that’s exciting about it is that it’s research, and it’s reportage, and it’s criticism. But it’s also

Jessica Hopper is editor-in-chief of the Pitchfork Review and the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. “I have an agenda. You can’t read my writing and not know that I have a staunch fucking agenda at all times.” T

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