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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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