My Washington Monthly Education 

A year ago, I was in my childhood bedroom, firing off job applications and experiencing what I would later write about for the Washington Monthly: that new graduates don’t launch into the labor market; they seep in slowly, usually with dread, even more so during economic downturns like the self-made one America is living through. However, I wrote, the truth is that college graduates are far better positioned than those without a degree. It’s frustrating when you’re the one sending out résumés. Still, it’s precisely the kind of nuanced story the Monthly exists to tell—resistant to the louder, simpler narratives that dominate the news cycle, but essential for policymakers to understand.  

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A year later, I’m still in my childhood bedroom. But thankfully, as the data would predict, I landed a job. And now I’m somehow writing stories, commissioning writers, and helping shape a legendary 56-year-old magazine. 

I’m learning a lot, Monthly-style. My phone often rings, and it’s Paul Glastris, the editor-in-chief, who gives editing notes by phone, usually unannounced. (“You got a second?” means: buckle up.) When I interviewed with him, he asked who I read. I said Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias, assuming it was a safe response for a center-left publication like the Washington Monthly. (It had the added virtue of being true.) Klein is a former Monthly intern after all, touted on our application page. Paul nodded. A few weeks later, when he called and asked me to critique Klein’s “abundance” theory of what ails the country and liberalism, I don’t think he remembered that conversation. 

The piece I wound up co-authoring with Paul in March was the first comprehensive response to the arguments made by abundance liberals like Klein and Yglesias—about housing, energy, and the role of the state. Some 50 stories in other outlets have rehashed our points. 

But that’s how it works when you write for a magazine that’s ahead of the curve. We were the first to dedicate an entire issue responding to the abundance movement, and since then, we’ve continued to strengthen our case with additional reporting and investigations. Other publications are always playing catch-up. 

We don’t just catch ideas early, we catch people, too. My favorite piece I’ve written is a profile of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a pundit many people hadn’t heard of, who has evolved from a left-leaning academic to a social-justice liberal to a MAGA cheerleader. (Matt Cooper, the executive editor, worked at the Monthly when he was my age, suggested the idea, and edited the piece.) She wouldn’t talk to me, but her friend Steve Bannon did. I called her “the first new media star of the second Trump presidency.” To my surprise, Jonathan Chait of The Atlantic and Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC shared the piece, a testament to our small magazine’s reach. Batya is now a CNN contributor and has her own eponymous show on NewsNation.

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What I’ve learned at the Washington Monthly is simple: look where others aren’t. Ask the complex question. Build the case. And then write the hell out of it. Start over and do it again.  

That approach has taken me everywhere. I wrote a piece on New York Democrats’ Election Day wipeout, focusing on candidates like Representative Pat Ryan, who’d figured out how to outperform. I interviewed a lawyer from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about the gutting of his agency from within. I spoke with Democratic and Republican operatives in Kansas about the parallels between Trump’s second-term policies and Sam Brownback’s disastrous supply-side experiment for a piece that turned out to be prescient. And I’ve managed to insert myself into the debate about the future of the Democratic Party, American liberalism, and MAGA. 

After ten months here, I’m still pinching myself. None of it would’ve happened without this magazine and the chances it takes on young writers, as well as the mentoring it provides them. 

This magazine wouldn’t exist without readers like you. 

If you’ve ever read something in the Monthly and thought, “I haven’t seen that anywhere else,” that’s not an accident. That’s what happens when a magazine with a skeleton staff and a shoestring budget gives young people like me a shot. And when it hits, it hits hard. 

A $50 gift gets you a subscription. A larger one allows us to publish stories that other outlets wouldn’t touch—and means a new crop of writers, restless and eager to prove themselves. 

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