When everyone's focused on the conventional parts of war - doing infantry imbeds or chasing IEDs - you look at the thing that seems not that interesting to people, like the circumstances of logistics workers cooking the troops' food or cleaning their latrines.

I think when I was doing my very first interviews, I probably brought a notepad and did ask people my first fifteen questions while sitting in a Starbucks or something horrible like that. And I found that, oftentimes, the most important thing at the very first interview is just establishing a personal connection and developing some sort of rapport so that I can go back to them again, and then maybe again, and maybe again after that.

I found it really astonishing that undocumented migrants were kidnapped so routinely, that it was such a commonplace part of the journey for people trying to reach the US, and that we hear almost nothing about it here.

One thing I've discovered is that if you remain in contact with people, if you build longitudinal relationships, if you invest in sources who seem at first like they're uncomfortable or unwilling to talk, if you keep in touch with them, a year later that might yield something much more powerful.

The tremendous challenge of narrative journalism about subjects that are underreported is, how do you make people care about something they think they already know about, or think they don't need to know about?

Often, I'm spending months with a person in a very intimate context, getting to know the ins and outs of what they ate for breakfast, not to mention dredging up the most traumatic experiences of their lives, digging through their documents and photographs from difficult times, all of that. And that process, I think, can be extraordinarily strange for subjects who've never been interviewed before, especially if you don't acquaint them from the get-go with what you're trying to do, what it entails, and why you care.

Workers are actually being starved on the largest military base in Baghdad, and women are being raped with impunity - and because it doesn't fit into a Hollywood context it's not going to fly.