I feel like I partly came to writing through being in college during the start of the Iraq war, and knowing that those issues mattered lot to me, and wanting to go see for myself.

What narrative journalism does is create a language or open up a space where someone can say, "Oh, this happened to me, too."

I tend to only be able to obsess about one thing at once, and become fully engaged in and only interested in that thing. But in the longer term, a lot of my stories also give birth to other stories.

I always knew I wanted to write, but I didn't know that I would want to do investigative reporting - in part because it seemed so ill-suited for my personality, or I thought it was ill-suited for my personality, insofar as I'm not very aggressive, and I'm not confrontational.

I wanted to think about ways to get an American readership concerned with what is happening in Mexico, but also to reframe it as a problem Americans share.

People are sometimes losing their homes before being convicted of a crime, or their cash or their cars.

I think the daily challenge for a lot of beat reporters is, how do you get past the regurgitated sound bites of powerful people or evasion masters who are so used to this routine - the theatricality of press conferences and stage-managed interviews and teams of handlers?