The Year in Jumping Ship

1.

I’ve been writing and editing — in formal and informal capacities — for most of my career, but I’d mostly worked full time at tech companies. I’d had good experiences and bad. For one, knowing how to write and edit in a place that doesn’t quite understand that makes you seem like a magician. On the other hand, it also means you’ll spend a lot of your day justifying the importance of what you do, or explaining what it is at all to people whose only follow up question is “how does this scale?”

I got very good at running meetings and presenting slideshows that could convince people that, yes, editorial is important and, yes, it could scale. But I was lying. Great work doesn’t scale. Nothing good scales. I think tech companies know this, which is why they settle for mediocrity en masse.

So I left my job, planning to take a few months off to figure out what I really wanted to do. Then GQ reached out and suddenly I was interviewing and then I was figuring out a start date and, before I knew it, I was at a desk, assigning and taking pitches for reported features. At first, I wondered if I should’ve taken more time to sort myself out before jumping into something new. But that feeling faded fast. Since the first week, working at GQ has been great. I always thought working at a “traditional media company” would feel slow and regressive compared to tech. So far it’s turned out to be the opposite. Not being in tech anymore means no more Powerpoints, no more needlessly long meetings, no more explaining why “All Lives Matter” is problematic. Instead, for the first time in my career, I just got to focus on doing good work. Writing and editing isn’t magic. Like anything else, doing it well just takes a lot of patience and elbow grease.

Not every outlet—especially web-focused ones—get that. I’m lucky that I get the time and space to do that, and I can’t express enough gratitude for the trust and support I get at GQ. Instead of trying to make editorial work in places that didn’t understand it, I could just work at a place where that’s the point of the whole thing. Who knew?

This was also a year where I wrote less (though I dropped some pieces further below out of obligation). It’s just that in 2016, I’m prouder of the writers I’ve had the privilege of publishing on GQ.com. I’m recommending not just these pieces, but also these writers. On top of all being a total pleasure to work with, these writers wrestled with big, ambiguous ideas and turned them into excellent features. It was hard to keep this to a list of ten, so I cheated and picked twelve.

“Why Women Own Guns” by Ashley Fetters

“What Happens When the Police Misidentify You as the Dallas Shooter” by Darryl Campbell

“The Libertarian Utopia That’s Just a Bunch of White Guys on a Tiny Island” by Morgan Childs

“The Excellence of Colson Whitehead” by Kima Jones

“Can Jonathan Safran Foer Make a Comeback?” by Alex Shephard

“Korryn Gaines and the Erasure of Violence Against Black Women” by Muna Mire

“A 2-Year-Old YG Track Is Under Fire for Encouraging Robberies Against Chinese Americans” by Esther Wang

“The Pirate Restaurateur of Hong Kong” by Jessica Wei

“Hip-Hop Is Having Its Punk Moment, and It’s a Quiet Revolution” by Bryan Washington

“Sebastian Bach, Hair-Metal God, Is Aging as Gracefully as His Beautiful Mane” by Jen Doll

“This Is How Star Trek Invented Fandom” by Molly McArdle

“Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins Steps Into the Spotlight” by Safy Hallan Farah

2.

Here are four things I wrote that people told me they liked:

“Wrestling Taught Me How (Not) To Be A Man” for BuzzFeed

“American Horror Stories” for GQ

“Caught Between the New Country and the Old” for The New York Times Book Review

“Year in Reading” for The Millions