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.

There is space for a different kind of investigative reporting that's about immersion and obsessive attention to detail and deep listening.

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?

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.

For me, the part of reporting that's the most rewarding and energizing is just hearing directly from people whose voices haven't often been heard, or incorporated into mainstream media. That stuff is really, really gratifying, and so to realize that you could make a career of that part of it, that appealed to me.

I try to come to my reporting as a real, whole person, not an automaton.

There’s no such thing as being totally ‘found’…the fun, I think, is in the searching.