Nicholas Carlson writes for Business Insider. His book Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! came out this week. “To me people are what’s really interesting. Marissa Mayer is a once in a lifetime subject. She’s full of contradictions. … There are a

Dan P. Lee is a contributing writer at New York. "I don't believe in answers. That's what compels me to write all of these stories. None of them ends nicely, none of them ends neatly." Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring this week's episode. Show not

Evan Wright, a two-time National Magazine Award winner, is the author of Generation Kill. "When people were killed, civilians especially, I realized I was the only person there who would write it down. I was frantic about getting names, and in the book t

Hanna Rosin is a senior editor at The Atlantic and a founder and editor at DoubleX. “I often think of reporting as dating, or even speed dating. You’re looking for someone where there’s a spark there between you and them. Sometimes that happens right awa

Meghan Daum's latest book of essays is The Unspeakable. “As writers we think, well there has to be closure, there has to be a beginning middle end, the character has to go through a change. And then in life we're supposed to have some sort of arc or aha

Katie J.M. Baker is a reporter for BuzzFeed. “I went to Steubenville a year after the sexual assault to cover their first big football game of the season and I was face-to-face with these people who I had been writing about without knowing much about the

Alec Wilkinson is a staff writer for The New Yorker. “My hero was Joseph Mitchell, that was how you did reporting. There was nothing conniving about it or cunning — you just simply kept returning and kept returning.” Thanks to TinyLetter for sponsoring

Emma Carmichael, a former editor at Deadspin and The Hairpin, is the editor in chief of Jezebel. "Online feminism has more and more rules lately. There are only so many things you can say. And while our opinions are getting more constrained online, perso

Reihan Salam is the executive editor of National Review. "I’m incredibly curious about other people. I’m curious about what they think of as the constraints operating on their lives. Why do they think what they think? If I weren’t doing this job, I’d wan

Jake Halpern, a contributor to This American Life, has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. 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 tel

Jen Percy is the author of Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism. "As is the nature of obsession, you just start gathering materials, hoarding documents and taking notes in a way that’s totally chaotic and overwhelming. You don’t even care yet because you’re

Jessica Pressler writes for New York, Elle and GQ. "I really like hustlers, stories about someone who comes out of nowhere and tries to do it for themselves. Those people are just easy to like. Even when they're sort of terrible, they're easy to like."

Wendy MacNaughton is a graphic journalist and the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them. "We mostly hear stories from big personalities who already have a spotlight on them. I think that everybody carries stories that are just as pr

Don Van Natta Jr., a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, writes for ESPN and is the author of several books, including Wonder Girl. "The nature of the kind of work I do as an investigative reporter, every story you do is going to get attacked and the tires

Today we are re-airing our February 2013 interivew with our friend Matt Power, who died earlier this year while on assignment in Uganda, to help raise money for Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award. We have also reprinted Matt's classic 2005 article, "

Anne Helen Petersen writes for BuzzFeed. Her book Scandals of Classic Hollywood is out this week. "I was obsessed with Entertainment Weekly from the very first issue and I obsessively catalogued it. I made a database on my Apple IIe where I put in the ti

Chris Hayes hosts All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and is an editor-at-large for The Nation. "The instability was so intense and the anguish and frustration were so intense that there wasn’t a ton of time to think through, 'Well, what is my role in this?

Buzz Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize winner, has written for Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, GQ and more. He is the author of several books, including Friday Night Lights. "It’s quiet. And I really felt I needed that quiet. People say, 'Well anger

Sean Wilsey has written for The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, and McSweeney’s Quarterly, where he is an editor-at-large. His latest book is More Curious. "I’m actually apparently a fairly competent person at getting things d

Emily Bazelon is a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine and the author of Sticks and Stones. "There’s nothing purely, or maybe even at all, altruistic about this exchange. It’s transactional in the Janet Malcolm classical sense, but also in the em

Zach Baron is a staff writer for GQ. "People love to put celebrity stuff or culture stuff lower on the hierarchy than, say, a serial killer story. I think they're all the same story. If you crack the human, you crack the human." Thanks to TinyLetter and

Ben Anderson is a war journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest book, The Interpreters, is available free from Vice. "You're surrounded by people who are so poor. Maybe their family members have already been killed. And they still can't leave. So

Lewis Lapham, formerly the editor of Harper's, is the founder of Lapham's Quarterly. "The best part of my job was to come across a manuscript. You never knew what would show up. ... I always had the sense of opening a present, hoping to be both delighted

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,

Brin-Jonathan Butler has written for SB Nation, ESPN, and The New York Times. His new book is A Cuban Boxer’s Journey. "He smiled at me and just to make small talk, I said, 'You know, you’ve got this gold grill on your teeth. Where did you get that from?