Today's interviewee is a writer I admire very much for her quality of reporting and writing as well as the breadth of material she covers--her writing has appeared in ESPN The Magazine, Elle, WIRED, Marie Claire, NYLON, DETAILS, NYMag.com, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the Book of Jezebel and Best American Sportswriting 2014. She currently writes for Slate where she recently switched from covering women's issues to writing about internet culture--she was rewarded for her knowledge of both when she received a Sidney award last year for her excellent and depressing piece "Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet." Her writing can also be found these days at the New York Times Magazine. You can find out more about her here and follow her here on Twitter.

I don't know very much about your 'origin story': when in your life did you first begin writing seriously? What do you consider your first big breaks?
I got my first journalism job off of Craigslist. It was an editorial assistant position at the Washington City Paper that required me to open mail and type event listings into a database, and because I had just graduated from college with a creative writing degree, I was not overqualified. Most of my "breaks" have arisen from weird, unfortunate economic forces. A few months after I started at the City Paper, it was sold to a nefarious newspaper chain and a bunch of people got laid off and my position was downgraded into an unpaid internship. But I was cheap and eager and got promoted to columnist, which was, at the time, completely horrifying. Then I went to a local news start-up that quickly imploded, so I moved to L.A. to work for a magazine out there. A year later, me and all my coworkers were spectacularly fired and a lot of people heard about it, so I ended up getting some good freelance gigs out of that. One of those gigs was at Slate, which eventually turned into a job-job, and that's where I am now.

What prompted you to switch from writing about women to covering internet culture for Slate?
I got really bored! I had been writing about women pretty consistently for five or six years. Women kept doing new stuff, but I stopped having new thoughts about it. I also think it's really important for people with an awareness of gender to write about anything other than gender. When I write about the internet it is definitely informed by an interest in gender and feminism and sexuality and justice, it's just not so on the nose. So far, I've gotten to write about how young men are drawn to suicide intervention message boards, and how young women are becoming the internet's most dedicated conspiracy theorists, and penis emoji, so it's still very much a part of my stories.

You've written on the (literally) abusive feedback you've received from some readers. Do you have a policy against reading your comments otherwise, and if you don't, do they ever shape or help you as a writer?
I dabble. I've found that when I'm not writing about women's issues, the comments are a lot more pleasant. And when I write about men--like a Father's Day essay I wrote about my relationship with my dad, or the story I reported about depressed young men on Reddit--the comments tend to be really pleasant. Isn't that annoying? I try not to spend too much time on comments, and I definitely don't see them as an accurate reflection of my worth, but I'll scan them sometimes, because occasionally a commenter will plant a seed of a story idea that I might want to follow up on later. I actually read comments on other journalists' work more than I read my own, for that reason.

You have experience as both a writer and an editor. What do you get out of each role that you can't get from the other?
As a writer, you learn how terrible editors can be. As an editor, you learn how terrible writers can be. I think the combination of those experiences has made me a more empathetic colleague. 

What are some of the most basic, but helpful, lessons you've learned when it comes to being a good reporter?
I am still working on the basics of being a good reporter, so I am open to suggestions. But a few things I am working on internalizing are: I'm generally about ten times as scared to ask a question as the person is to answer it; the way someone talks is as useful as what they say; and even though I write about the internet I get most of my story ideas from talking to people, not clicking around.

You've mentioned that your former editor Ann Friedman is one of your mentors, and that having female role models in journalism is very important to you. Who else in the field has taught you, either directly or through her work?
I have been really lucky to have super smart women and men teach me how to do my job, some more explicitly than others, but I'll stick to the women here. Jule Banville helped me so much when I started working for the City Paper and was scared out of my mind. I had a lot of trouble accepting the idea that my writing was worth reading, and I was especially anxious when I was tasked with writing less-than-flattering things about some of my subjects. Jule told me that my job wasn't to make my subject like me, or to make myself feel liked, but to satisfy my responsibility to the reader. I still think about that all the time.

Ann Friedman taught me how to write for a magazine--to slow down and set a scene--which is the reason anyone read that James Deen profile we did.

And my current editor at Slate, Allison Benedikt, has this rare ability to make my work better and also make me--an anxious and neurotic person--feel better about doing that work. I think a lot of journalists who get into management aren't naturally very good at actually managing the people who work for them, and I hope that if I ever do that I can be half the manager Allison is.

I'm impressed by the wide range of subjects you've covered. What's an assignment you've had that initially felt outside your wheelhouse that you felt turned out well?
When I wrote my first thing for ESPN the Magazine, I was really nervous. The story was for their annual Body Issue, and it was about how boobs affect athletic performance.  That's a potentially super offensive premise: So, do your boobs get in the way of doing sports? But the story did not end up being super offensive, because I wrote it, and while I had zero experience writing about sports, I had a lot of experience writing about women's bodies without getting weird about it. It felt really cool to write a sports story that my editors and I knew a man could never pull off. And it made me more comfortable writing about non-breast-related sportsy things down the line.

I have to ask: how did you end up writing the Playboy story on rimming? Was that assigned to you or did you pitch it?
My brilliant editor there, Zak Stone, pitched this story to me, and I gladly accepted the challenge. I just fished out his initial email: "This is kind of raunchy but I think something anecdotal about straight-male desire for analingus could be interesting, since it's such a taboo and doesn't really get discussed ... ever." Until we did, in Playboy in 2013. This story was such a fun matchup of editor and writer, because it felt like I was channeling Zak's vision, and also that vision concerned women licking dudes' butts. Usually when I write about sex and gender it risks getting fraught and personal, but in this case I didn't feel really strongly about girls doing butt stuff on boys until we got really deep into the story and both Zak and I started elevating the argument to the level of, like, a campy sexual freedom issue--free the straight male butt or whatever.  It was also fun because Zak, a gay dude, and me, a straight lady, were conspiring to open up this sexual avenue for straight guys, which felt slightly nefarious and cool.

You make short hair look cute and effortless. Do you have any advice for the longhairs who contemplate cutting it all off?
Honestly, I am growing my hair out, and am taking a hair-growth supplement that the Internet told me celebrities use, and it is still taking forever, and it's the worst. I wish I had really long thick hair so that when I braided it and turned around really fast I could hit someone in the face with it and knock them over with it, but I will settle for a chin-length bob. What I can say is that I get a lot of compliments on my haircut, from men but especially from women, just because it's different than the typical girl cut. And it's kind of the perfect aesthetic complement; it's not skeevy or sexual, and it concerns personal style without referencing some thing you bought at a store.

You've written both about boy bands and the People's Sexiest Man Alive--if you had to choose, which are your favorites of each?
Adam Levine is the only person who could be considered both a "Sexiest Man Alive" recipient and a boy band member. Isn't that gross? The categories are probably best kept separated. I choose One Direction for the fandom and Matthew McConaughey for getting this quote printed in People magazine next to a shirtless portrait of himself: "I love tuna fish. I add sweet corn Niblets. Do you know how good it tastes?"

How does it feel to be the 405th person interviewed for Zulkey.com?
Like a notch on a bedpost. Let's not make it about the number.