Something I never could have predicted is that one of my favorite parts of the culture writing I do is getting to interview people. I have pretty bad social anxiety-- manageable, but always present-- and at first, the idea of getting on the phone with a stranger sounded like my idea of raw, uncut hell. To keep myself safe I used to do a lot of email interviews, but gradually I learned that they just aren't ever as good as what you get in an actual conversation: the texture of the way someone speaks, and how you can follow up in real time, chase an observation or clarify a point as it passes. Also when I had a desk job I simply had to make phone calls sometimes, and that got me over a lot of my dumb millennial phone fear. (A lot but not all; for various reasons, I do prefer in-person if at all possible.)

But from this vantage point of course it makes sense: I like talking to people, I'm just always scared something is going to... happen, go wrong, embarrass me, ???, while I'm doing it. An interview is like a conversation but planned and structured, and veiled by the plausible deniability that I'm just doing my job, being this intense and nosy and focused. Like, actually, of course I'm drawn to a profession that allows me to sit in a corner observing, and then to presume intimacy with someone, to be curious and probing at some length.

It's not just what I bring to the experience, though. These conversations bring me out of myself, too; they allow me a measure of intimacy with a lot of people I never would have met otherwise, and getting to know and understand them broadens my world and my ways of thinking considerably. 

Photographer and TikTok star David Suh, who I recently profiled for The LA Times, is a perfect example of this. Like okay, he's very charming, and he does seem to have an uncanny knack for making people look good in photos, but I didn't go into that interview thinking it was going to be, like, revelatory. But it was! It was. Watching him turn the often-objectifying experience of a photo shoot into something that felt genuinely collaborative, creative and expressive gave me plenty to think about, both as someone who viscerally hates being photographed, but also as someone who had, in a sense, come to take a portrait of her own. We all take so many fucking photographs of ourselves and each other, but Suh talked to me about what that meant in ways that gave me new language and ways of thinking about the process.

That's another piece of the pleasure, of course: when I'm interviewing someone, it's because they're probably also intense nerds about something, and it's very fun to watch them unspool on their particular thing. I get to be a generalist, dipping in and out of a million different worlds, picking up shiny things like a magpie along the way. I benefit from so many people's expertise, and I am grateful every time they trust me enough to let me tell their stories.