My work is often very solitary. It’s usually just me flying to the country where I am reporting, staying by myself in a hotel and then meeting up with our translators and fixers during the day. When I’m writing, it’s even lonelier. It was so much fun to have my audio colleague Andy Mills for one of my trips to Iraq. He was at my side for almost four weeks. We slept on the roofs of abandoned buildings together. We embedded with troops and searched buildings side by side. And then back in New York, it was such a rush to be able to work with a team — including producers Larissa Anderson and Asthaa Chaturvedi and our editors Wendy Dorr and Sam Dolnick. We all shared in the creation of this project.

Does the podcast allow you to tell stories that elude the printed word?

Audio allows you to be much more transparent with listeners about the process through which you got the story. For example, last year in a story Andy and I recorded for The Daily, another Times podcast, about recently rescued Yazidi girls, who had been raped over three years by the Islamic State, we entered a tent where we found two girls, both collapsed. They appeared to be unconscious and I realized right away that we had no business being there. In the audio, you hear me telling Andy that we need to leave. I think that singular moment speaks to the immense trauma that this community has faced and allows listeners to understand that getting these interviews is not a simple, walk-in, walk-out scenario. You’re also wrestling with the ethical dimension of whether you should even be there.