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 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.

One thing I've discovered is that I never think of something that didn't work out as just "something that didn't work out." I think so often with investigative work, things that initially look like failures wind up leading to your biggest stories.

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.

It's been nice, actually, to keep in touch with a lot of the people and families that I've written about. Like with the kids I was just writing about from Guatemala, who survived being kidnapped and fleeing violence, it was nice to just sit down in their living room and play bingo with them, go to dinner with the family. And sometimes not thinking about it in such a mechanistic "I am now coming to report and get what I need" way, but just spending time, helps you see a more natural version of who they are too.

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.

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.