I Was a Washington Monthly Whippersnapper

In August 2023, I was stressed. I had graduated from college in New England in June and moved to Washington, D.C., a week later for a summer internship at Politico with their magazine team. In a leap of faith, I had signed a one-year lease on a rowhouse with a couple of buddies, far from my home in Los Angeles.

I had a folder of Chrome bookmarks labeled “Jobs” containing the career page for every publication where I wanted to work. I’d log on daily and peruse mostly blank pages or jobs for mid-career journalists. Due mainly to Big Tech’s monopolization of ad revenue (which Phil Longman has written about in the Washington Monthly), the print-media industry is famously declining, as is pretty much all written-word media, and the job market for young up-and-comers is brutal as a result.

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But I found another internship soon after, this time at the Washington Monthly, funded not by trying to squeeze every penny out of a monopolized online advertising industry but by generous donors like you.

I was sold on the Monthly’s compelling, original journalism that combined deep reporting with productive solutions. The prose was snappy, sharp, and smart, the kind that you look forward to reading, not the kind where you look forward to having read it. I was also sold on their illustrious list of alums. The intern alumni include Ezra Klein of The New York Times, Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, John Harris, the co-founder and Global Editor-in-Chief of Politico, not to mention Paul Glastris, the Monthly’s editor-in-chief, and Matthew Cooper, its executive editor–digital.

I started by fact-checking, like all magazine interns (at least at the ones that still have internships). But quickly, I was assigned two stories to report and write. The first was about the unlikely event that a presidential candidate drops out (or is forced to drop out) after the primaries. The second was about the vicious fight between ultra-MAGA state legislators and their medium-MAGA colleagues, who were choosing to fight mostly about their allegiance to Donald Trump and less about the new policy ideas the populist wing of the GOP wanted to bring in.

The first piece turned out to be more prophecy than contingency. The second previewed the intra-MAGA squabbling that could be the second Trump presidency’s hallmark, unless all Republicans bend the knee. Similar to some state legislators, Representative Matt Gaetz, I noted, spends far too much of his time fighting Trump’s battles (and perhaps breaking the law) when he ought to spend more time on his policy ideas that are uncommon in the Republican Party, like his distaste for omnibus budget bills that obstruct the workings of government. Gaetz is also a staunch anti-monopolist who calls himself a Khanservative (because of his alignment with Lina Khan, who wrote early important pieces on antitrust for the Monthly as a young lawyer before her fame as the Federal Trade Commission chair.). Now, Gaetz is Trump’s pick for Attorney General, and the ultra-MAGA vs. medium-MAGA feud has boiled over into the Republican-run Senate over confirming him.

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I had gone from admiring the Monthly’s prescient ideas to doing my small part to keep the tradition going.

While I was working on that piece, Charlie Peters, the founder of the Washington Monthly, died at age 96.

Monthly alumni called in from their esteemed perches—The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker—to tell us (and write for us about) how much the John F. Kennedy appointee and the magazine’s long-time editor had meant to them. At his memorial, I met alums of the Monthly who were accomplished in journalism and had the Monthly to thank for helping them get their start. I was in a room full of role models, and we had this magazine in common.

In January, I was promoted to associate editor. Over the past year, with the help of terrific colleagues, I’ve written pieces on the scandal of overpriced master’s degrees, which rely on government inaction to scam thousands. I’ve learned how to commission, edit, and write stories in that classic Monthly style—how to find ideas where nobody else is looking, anchor the story in deep, interesting reporting, and look towards solutions that can make our country better.

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None of this would be possible without the generous support of Washington Monthly donors like you. The media has dramatically changed since 1969, and the pipeline for young journalists has shrunk tremendously. But the Monthly is still kicking and screaming, picking up young whippersnappers who can aid in the same mission we’ve always had.

I’m proud to be one of those young whippersnappers, and if you want our lineage to continue, we hope you’ll consider donating to the Monthly today. Please do it now. A $50 donation gets you a free subscription to the print magazine and ensures that we can continue being a beacon of ideas no matter how dark the world seems.

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