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.

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.

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton. And it's always one of the strange discomforts of the job, that you're in this very intense moment in someone's life - you're engaging with them nonstop - and then suddenly your piece is out and that's done. It always reminds me that the journalist's job isn't to be someone's friend, or their psychologist, or anything other than what we actually are. And at the end of the day, that can definitely seem like such a strange, extractive relationship.

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.

I think most of us, as writers, have had experiences where you get edited and it doesn't feel like your voice at all. And so it's been nice to go through the experience of having a lot wind up on the cutting-room floor, and yet still feel that your voice is being - not purified, but made more yourself. I think that's a very rare thing.

I tend to gravitate toward the "act two," or "act three," or "act four" stories - either things that are underreported, where we think we already know the common narrative, or things that are at the margins of an over-reported story, where we're all so focused in one direction that we're missing something crucial that's unfolding off to the side.

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.