Our generation grew up with the Review as a fact of life. It was America’s literary magazine. To our minds, it still is. It has launched our favorite writers. It has made a special claim for the quarterly as such, being both timely and lasting, free of the news of the day or the pressure to please a crowd. Most of all, the Review has shown, repeatedly, that works of imagination can be as stylish and urgent as the flashiest feature reporting, and can do more to refocus our picture of the world.

I have the feeling that the magazine can reach many more people than it reaches and has something to offer that not everyone knows who should know it. That's why we're starting an app, and that's why we do the blog. But editorially, I think it's mainly a matter of keeping your eyes peeled. You just really don't know what's going to come along.

I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.

I love having people around who are better interviewers than I am and who can make the time to do a really great job. All of the interviews that we've published are with people who really interest me.

I hadn't thought about the balance in mood. You see that we did it in alphabetical order, so if there's any kind of shape, or any kind of flow, it's random. Gender...we didn't think much about it. It was sort of interesting to see that women often were choosing women and men often were choosing men. And sometimes they wouldn't and that was fun. I didn't know that I would be excited by that, until I saw it happen.

Chekhov's stories are about the moment that a life goes off the rails and the price that will be paid - forever. That's a typical Chekhov story for you. Something that you're used to lying in bed worrying about at four in the morning, before you have the psychic defenses to kid yourself and tell yourself to get up and shower and go to the office.

I've never thought that it made sense to put something out that I didn't actually find really fun to read. Or, if not "fun," engaging. My tastes are whatever they are, but I may be a little bit afraid of certain kinds of density. I may get turned off by certain kinds of show-offyness.