David Kushner, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, has written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired and The Atavist. "The minute you see an incredible character, you know. The only thing I can compare it to is bowling, not that I'm much of a bowler

Ariel Levy is a staff writer at The New Yorker. "I like an older awesome lady, I don't think enough is written about older awesome ladies and I don't think there are enough role models for younger awesome ladies. It’s great fun hanging out with an older

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

Roger D. Hodge is the editor of Oxford American. "My career isn't all that interesting insofar as I've been an editor. I'm much more interested in talking about writers and stories. That's the main thing: telling these stories, creating this platform, th

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.

Jon Mooallem, a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine, is the author of Wild Ones and American Hippopotamus, the latest story from The Atavist. "I'm terrible at writing nut graphs. I never know why people should keep reading. That’s the mena

Joe Sexton is a senior editor at ProPublica and a former reporter and editor at the New York Times, where he led the team that produced "Snow Fall." "My experience in a newspaper newsroom over the years has been: The word you hear least often, the word t

Andrew Leland is an editor at The Believer and hosts The Organist. "I think a good editor has a strong stomach for crazy assholes. Because often crazy assholes are really brilliant great writers." Thanks to TinyLetter and Squarespace for sponsoring this

Jason Fagone, a contributing editor at Wired and a writer-at-large for Philadelphia, is the author of Ingenious. "It seemed like all the big guys in American society had let us down, all the elites. And here was a contest that was explicitly looking to t

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

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 clinic

Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery are the co-editors of Mother Jones. "We probably pay more attention to our fact-checking and our research than almost everybody in our industry. By the time we publish stuff, we make sure it's unimpeachable because peop

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

Andy Ward, a former editor at Esquire and GQ, is the editorial director of nonfiction at Random House. "How you gain that trust is a hard thing to quantify. The way I try do it is by caring. If you don't care about every word and every sentence in the pi

Elizabeth Wurtzel is the author of four books, including Prozac Nation. "It's not that hard to be a lawyer. Any fool can be a lawyer. It's really hard to be a writer. You have to be born with incredible amounts of talent. Then you have to work hard. The

Gay Talese, who wrote for Esquire in the 1960s and currently contributes to The New Yorker, is the author of several books. His latest is A Writer's Life. "I want to know how people did what they did. And I want to know how that compares with how I did w

Jon Ronson, a contributor to This American Life, The Guardian and GQ, is the author of six books, including The Men Who Stare at Goats. His latest is Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries . "The older you get, you realize that no uncomfortable fact makes

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants . "The categories are in motion. You turn into a Goliath, then you topple because of your bigness. You fall to

Cord Jefferson is the West Coast Editor at Gawker. "I consider myself to be a sincere human being. And I think that the way the internet carries itself, the way the internet has dialogues, is often insincere. That concerns me. I don't ever want to lose m

Hamilton Morris is the science editor for Vice and a contributor to Harper's. "It's a shame that there isn't more of an interdisciplinary approach to a lot of scientific investigations, because often the result is that misinformation is produced. Again,

Nancy Jo Sales writes for Vanity Fair and is the author of The Bling Ring. "I'm a mom now, so my life's a little different. I can't do certain things that I used to do, and I won't, because they're dangerous or ridiculous or keep me out till five in the

Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. "People don't really care about issues so much as they care about the stories and the characters that bring those issues to life. ... A story needs an engine or something to propel you forward and it c

Eli Saslow is a staff writer at the Washington Post and a contributor at ESPN the Magazine. It's not really my place to complain about it being hard for me to write. I wrote the story ("After Newtown Shooting, Mourning Parents Enter Into the Lonely Quiet

Joshuah Bearman is the co-founder of Epic Magazine and a freelance writer. His latest story is "Coronado High." "People who know me well will realize that parts of this story are actually about me. … It's about loss of innocence and getting to a certain

Amy Harmon, a Pulitzer Prize winner, covers science and society for the New York Times. "I'm not looking to expose science as problematic and I'm not looking to celebrate it. But it can be double edged. Genetic knowledge can certainly be double edged. Of