A year in review
2025 writing and some other stuff
The Quiet Period is upon us. Circle backs have been penciled in, “let’s talk about that in 2026” or some version has been tapped out in billions of emails. The Quiet Period can be especially fraught for freelancers as a wall of automatic-replies go up that won’t come down until after the New Year, and even then there is an interstitial “digging out” period that is really about turning your brain back on post-holiday. (I get it, as there is also a holiday senioritis that strikes on the front end, typically around December 15th.) Basically, there is a full month where very little happens which always drives me a little insane. I already hate weekends because editors don’t reply to pitches or drafts on weekends1, and the holiday period is like one massive weekend.
All that is to say that I have a couple of short essays that are sitting in edits right now that I know won’t be published on this side of the year, so I’m doing a bit of public diary writing by talking about my year in clips. I am also, somehow, still sick, so excuse any foggy prose here, my brain is half working behind my eyeballs which hurt because of sinus pressure and I can’t taste anything. It sucks. And yes, I’m going to talk a little bit about being a straight white millennial trying to make it as a writer somewhere in here. You’ve been warned.
Fewer, better things
I’ve been writing for the New York Times since 2018, but only became a regular contributor in 2022. There’s a long story there, but to keep this brief I’m just going to talk about the last few years. I went through the NYT freelancer portal2 and looked at the spreadsheet of my publishing cadence for the last few years. I think I published like 4 things in 2022, 6 pieces in 2023, 18 in 2024, and then cooled backed down this year with 8 (I think. There are a few of NYT Mag pieces somewhere in there). Sort of uneven, but something cool happened during that time. In 2023 I had one cover for the Real Estate section, and then in 2024 I had a pair: one Thursday Styles and on Sunday Styles. In 2025, I ended up with 4 section cover stories: one for Real Estate, and then a trio of Sunday Styles covers. In reverse chronological order they were (all gift links):
I’m a lot happier with this cadence for a lot of different reasons, but one of the more abstract benefits has been developing an excellent partnership with my wonderful editor on the Styles desk Marie Solis. It’s gotten to the point that I understand not only what makes a good story for the desk, but also what constitutes a good story for us as a team and I’m deeply grateful to have that sort of relationship with a peer I trust and respect.
Some other favorite things I wrote this year
My first New Yorker story was for Michael Agger in 2023. It was about techno. The whole thing was pretty involved; I went to Detroit for a few days and ended up flying to Frankfurt for 24 hours to make sure the story got told the right way and I heard all sides of the argument. It was a professional triumph for me to get that story published and I thought it came out really well. (I think/hope Agger did too!) I thought I was on my way—but for a good 2 years I could barely get an email reply from anyone at the magazine. A lot of this was industry upheaval, but I couldn’t help but have a crisis of confidence about whether I could hack it or not.
And then that changed this year for reasons I still don’t get but I’m not going to complain about. I had my first print piece as a Talk of the Town in March and then a pair of online essays in October and November with a few more in the pipeline for (hopefully) early 2026. It feels good to have a quick, natural rapport with a new editor, and, honestly, being able to write from a place of opinion rather than journalistic objectivity was a nice challenging code switch. I forgot that I was allowed to be wrong, or that people could disagree with my conclusions when given the same set of evidence. The two most recent essays are here, and I’m proud of them:
The Most Dangerous Genre
Our obsession with deadly game shows—from “The Running Man” and “Squid Game” to MrBeast’s real-life reënactments—reflects a shift in the national mood to something increasingly zero-sum.Alt-travel influencers claim to show an unvarnished look at some of the world’s most dangerous places. But what are they leaving out?
A few other pieces I enjoyed writing this year in no particular order:
For The Nation, I wrote a long essay about the life and death on conspiracy cinema since the 1970s. Conspiracy thrillers are one of my favorite genres, so this was a fun, albeit difficult one to crack open because it easily could have been twice as long. Shout out my editor Kevin Lozano for the early course correct here; my initial draft was like a bad timeline of the 20th century film industry told at 1.5x speed.
In GQ, I wrote about how Bravo’s The Valley should be included in the modern canon of divorce literature and is in fact a more comprehensive portrait of the dissolution and disillusion of marriage than anything written in the last few years.
W Magazine asked me to write about why all the sports fellas were wearing high jewelry on the field and I got to write about how much I love the Dodgers in the fashion magazine of record which was fun.
And then for the New York Times Magazine, I wrote about the TikTok videos that were trying to end run bilateral diplomacy by trying to create direct links between Chinese manufacturers and American consumers. I enjoyed writing that piece, but it was especially meaningful because I ended up with this enhanced byline for the first time.
All in all I think I wrote, like, 20 pieces this year across NYT, New Yorker, GQ, the Nation, W, and a few other spots. I also have a demanding full-time job at a tech company as a writer. Which brings me to my next point.
Work harder
I legitimately don’t have the brain capacity to break down the argument in Jacob Savage’s piece about millennial white guys being iced out of elite cultural institutions in Compact. (Again, I’ve bee sick for like 10 days and still can’t think straight.) But I have a couple of personal things to say about it:
I went to Boston University, not exactly a prestige institution and certainly not the kind of place yields a particularly powerful and close knit network in media and the arts. I was a geography major, and spent the first near-decade of my career doing something totally different than I am now. I had wanted to write, sure, but I was also somewhat disabused of that career path by my family, who wanted me to choose a more financially sturdy industry3. I’m actually appreciative that I was softly forced to do that because it widened my professional aperture quite a bit, but I also totally lost out on the camaraderie and networking that many develop by interning and working together for peanuts at the bottom of the media hierarchy. I never interned at Gawker or the Awl or the FADER; I didn’t go to the media parties where everyone bonded with one another; I didn’t go to grad school at Columbia or NYU. For the most part, I operated and continue to operate outside of these networks and a lot of the time I have to fight harder to be included in conversations that often happen out of proximity and familiarity. All that is say that I should be a receptive audience for Savage’s polemic, that I have plenty to be bitter and resentful for given my lack of pedigree and access to the inner sanctum of culture and media. But whether it’s a dispositional allergy to bitterness or my own political leanings, I just don't have it in me to care that much about the fate of millennial white guys and the patently ineffective attempt by already-limp institutions to “diversity” their organizations, something that only ended served to recreate power structures with a Rainbow Coalition sheen to them.
If you’ll excuse me being deeply uncharitable and unsympathetic for a minute, I also think the piece is a screen that losers can project their failures onto and say “this is why I never made it, they took my career from me.” The idea that mediocrity is entitled to some high-flying success or, more depressingly, that being mediocre was “good enough” because of what you looked like for so long is not something worth pining over. What existed before the period in question wasn’t a meritocracy, and now what we’re left with is an utterly diminished landscape across entertainment, academia, and media. There is no middle class in Hollywood; universities are becoming both fossilized and emaciated; and there are like four national magazines left. Like I’ve said before, people have different definitions of what “hard work” entails and I get the sense that a lot of the guys who are crowing about finally being vindicated lack any sort of hustle.
I’m only engaging with one aspect of the piece because I don’t have the energy or, honestly, the desire to talk about the decontextualized statistics throughout the piece. I think it’s funny that a lot of people talk about this as if there was some sort of white guy extinction button the DEI committees pressed, but even if we take the statistics at face value, it’s not as if white dudes were totally shut out of these institutions, it was just that their overwhelming representation went down, in some cases quite sharply. Neither system is right, but it is funny to hear a lot of white fellas on Substack be like “well, if it was 2012 I would have gotten that teaching job at Wesleyan because DEI wasn’t around” as if being rewarded for being white is marginally better than being penalized for it. This is one of those knotty issues that quickly descending into discursion because there is no solution to it yet everyone pretends there is.
The last thing I will say is that I think there is a certain kind of high-achieving Harvard/Yale/Princeton graduate for whom their first 22 years on earth were all hyper-focused on conventional success. Their life is on a guide rail, like one of those cars on the Disneyland ride. Their high test scores and perfect grades and endless hours of tutoring were all building towards that acceptance letter and, then, after four years they expect their lives to unfold along exactly the same path. When they’re met with something they can’t access or, even worse, told they aren’t good enough for, something short circuits and they get desperate an explanation. I see it a lot of in tech, and I see it a lot with the responses to this piece.
That’s it, that’s all I’m giving to this dumbass discourse. The institutions in question are shells of themselves and people are crying about truth and reconciliation committees for white dudes who wanted to be in the Bojack Horseman writers’ room.
And to those who do, I love you sickos.
If you haven’t had to access this site before, it is hilariously bare bones but, also, charmingly utilitarian.
To sharpen what’s in between the lines here, it was made clear to me that if I chose to write full-time or went to a writing grad program that I would not be getting any monetary support.