THE WINNER

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Clang! Clink! Bang! Hear that? It’s the sound of all the hardware that Jake Silverstein’s New York Times Magazine has racked up in his almost eleven years at its helm: Pulitzers and ASMEs are heavy, people!

When we were preparing to speak to Jake, we reached out to a handful of editors who have loyally worked with him for years to find out what makes him tick. They describe an incredible and notably drama-free editor who fosters an amazing vibe and a lover of both literary essay and enterprise reporting who holds both an MA and an MFA. As one New York Times Mag story editor put it, Jake’s superpower is his “vigorous and institutionally-shrewd support of skilled reporters with strong voices pursuing projects that were just a little beyond the paper’s ordinary comfort zone.” 

Here’s a theory we set out to test in this interview—one that we’ve floated in our newsletter, The Spread, for years now: Is The New York Times Magazine the best women’s magazine out there? 

Yes, we’re talking about the stories they produce under Jake, like Susan Dominus’s ASME-winning, game-changing story about menopause and hormone replacement therapy, and Linda Villarosa’s feature shining a light on the Black maternal health crisis. 

But we’re also talking about the woman-loaded top of the Times Mag masthead, on which Gail Bichler, Jessica Lustig, Sasha Weiss, Ilena Silverman, and Adrienne Greene reign supreme—and seriously outnumber their male counterparts. 

And we could spend all day name checking favorite writers, like Dominus and Villarosa, but also Emily Bazelon, Danyel Smith, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Irina Aleksander, Jordan Kisner, Azmat Khan, Pam Colloff, Nikole Hannah-Jones, J Wortham, Wesley Morris. We could go on and on—you get the idea! 

So, did Jake agree with our women’s mag theory? And what is it like to have the deep resources it takes to make these kinds of stories these days? You’ll have to listen to find out.

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This episode is made possible by our friends at Commercial Type and Freeport Press.

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