Tim Urban is a popular blogger and the co-founder of “Wait But Why,” a site that discusses a wide variety of topics including picking the right career path, SpaceX rockets, and love. His most recent mammoth work is “The Story of Us,” a re-tracing of how we got to this political moment.

Caity Weaver is a favorite of the Sunday Long Read, appearing in multiple newsletters every year, always giving us thoughtful, clever, and enjoyable stories to read. This week, the New York Times features writer joins Jacob to talk about how she interviews celebrities, to outline how she interacts with editors, and to perform a real-time dive into her search history on the Oxford English Dictionary. Along the way she provides a few tips for writers and talks about how she discovers new...

There are few couples like Deborah and James Fallows, who have spent more than half a decade talking to people and visiting communities across America to produce "Our Towns," a New York Times bestseller, published last year, and an online series for The Atlantic. They're some of the smartest, most diligent people reporting on the state of the country today and they joined Jacob for a two-in-one SLR podcast to discuss their distinct reporting styles, the power of positive reporting, and the...

Charles Duhigg is a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, the author of The Power of Habit, and a magazine writer who most recently published an in-depth look at Amazon's world-eating growth for The New Yorker. “The first question I might ask is, ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t know enough to know what question to ask you. What do you think is the most interesting thing I could ask you about x?’ It catches them off guard ... and they always come up with some suggested question that never would...

"I kind of think of myself as a nature writer disguised as a food writer. Food is a great way to write about plants and animals because everyone has a built-in interest, " Rowan Jacobsen is an award-winning author who writes about food, sustainability, and the environment. Jacob and Rowan discuss how the latter delved into the world of food writing and some of his work including "Is Sunscreen The New Margarine?" for Outside, which became the most popular article in their website's history....

"If you don’t want to tell me something it makes me very interested in what it is.” Jessica Pressler is a staff writer at New York magazine and joins Jacob this week to talk interesting stories, screen adaptations, and empathy. Her article "The Hustlers at Scores," is the basis for the new movie "Hustlers," and Jessica discusses the unique experiences of having a story adapted for the screen and being visited in your own home by a movie star assigned to portray you (Hello, Julia Stiles!).

Jessica Contrera covers a wide range of topics as a narrative reporter for the Washington Post and in this week's podcast she chats with Don about her happiest (and saddest) stories, taking care of her mental health while covering traumatic events, and the positive influence a good editor has on a young reporter. Jessica has been featured several times in the Sunday Long Read newsletter and the stories of hers that we've highlighted include a deep dive about sexting teenagers, a piece about...

The best-selling author, GQ correspondent, and National Magazine Award Finalist is our latest guest. Laskas discusses her books and articles including To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope; her New York Times Magazine article "The Mailroom;" and her GQ article "Game Brain," which inspired the movie "Concussion." [0:49] Jeanne Marie on her book tour for “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope” [1:54] How she came up with the idea for the book, based off “Ten Letters A Day: To Obama...

Will Leitch founded Deadspin nearly 14 years ago. Since 2008, Leitch has written and worked outside of the site, most recently as a contributing editor at New York Magazine, a national correspondent for MLB, and the host of “The Will Leitch Show” on Sports Illustrated TV. “…During the years I actively ran [Deadspin] — now more than a decade in the past — I was ostensibly in charge of figuring out what was coming next on the sports internet; I was the supposed leader of the blog-barbarians at...

Anne Helen Petersen, although she's a superb culture writer for BuzzFeed News, still gets a little nauseous at the prospect of talking to people for her stories. She talks about that and more with Jacob on this week's episode, where they touch on reporting attire, Beto O'Rourke, and Anne's viral story on burnout. Anne was an academic before becoming a reporter on the fly and has adjusted to sharing her work in different ways, including in her newsletter, "the collected ahp."

Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine, a contributing writer at WIRED, and a contributing editor at Harper’s. He’s the author of a travel memoir called A Sense of Direction, and he teaches nonfiction in the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia. Here, he talks with Jacob about ideal story length (100 pages, anyone?), why it took months to work out the structure of his latest NYT Magazine piece, how he uses detail, and more.

"The clock doesn't run out until the very end," says Tommy Tomlinson, author of the new book "The Elephant in the Room: One fat man's quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America." Tommy talks about his book, his weight, and more with Don on this week's episode, which ranges from questions about emotional intelligence to the speed of Herschel Walker. Tommy, a 23-year veteran of the Charlotte Observer, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the host of his own podcast, has plenty of stories to tell and...