The Power Ranking You’ve Been Waiting For
Which former n+1 intern will rule them all?
Today we’ve got: The mayoral candidates like you’ve never seen them before! (In front of a bowl of spaghetti.) Former n+1-intern power rankings. Your pelvic organs can fall out of your vagina. And perhaps most important, Diego Luna. —Emily Gould
EARLY AND OFTEN
The Mayoral Candidates Dish About Whether Bill de Blasio Killed That Groundhog
Think you know how your ballot’s gonna look? This video might change everything for you.
We invited all the Democratic mayoral candidates to sit for a very special Dinner Party interview series. Stay tuned for more over the next week! Courtesy of Dinner Party friends Matt Stieb, Zach Schiffman, and Natalie Shutler.
“POWER”
If You Want To Make It in the Biz, Start at n+1
The not-at-all-definitive power ranking of the literary magazine’s former interns
.Last night at Tribeca private club Maxwell Social, n+1 magazine held a fundraising party that doubled as an awards ceremony to honor Gabriel Winant with the n+1 Writer’s Fellowship and Mark Doten with the Anthony Veasna So Fiction Prize. It was fun! Lots of editors, agents, and writers attended, many of whom were named Emily (Stokes, Greenhouse, Leibert, et cetera). My sibling-in-law M. Gessen, a host, made an appearance. Hari Kunzru and Katie Kitamura radiated quiet glamour. Ray from Girls was there as usual. My main takeaway, though, was that it’s been a while since I updated the Former n+1 Intern Power Rankings, a list that up until now has existed only in my brain.
Over the past 20 years, it’s become well known that in order to make it in what remains of the media, you should start your career with an n+1 internship. Or you might even go on to do something else, like write a book, run for office, or start a movement! From my vantage point as an ancient person who has seen it all and has been in a relationship with an n+1 co-founder since I was 28, I have a unique and biased perspective; your own rankings may vary. (Mine are listed from most to least powerful.) It only occurs to me now that I ought to have ranked these instead on a Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart. Someone else should feel free to do so.
Nikil Saval – was only an intern for one day. Wrote a great book about how open-plan offices are bad, then went on to become a Pennsylvania state senator.
Amanda Cassatt (née Gutterman) – got into crypto early and is probably the richest person on this list.
Moira Donegan – Guardian columnist. Started the “Shitty Media Men” list. Her first book, Gone Too Far: Me Too, Backlash, and the Future of Feminist Politics, is forthcoming from Scribner.
Leon Neyfakh – rose from Observer reporter (during the fabled Peter Kaplan era) to become a podcast phenom. Co-creator of Slow Burn, host of Fiasco, and co-founder of Prologue Projects. Has made more money than most of these people, if that’s how we’re defining “power.”
Annie Wyman – co-creator of the Netflix show The Chair starring Sandra Oh. TV trumps all other forms of media represented here, hence the high ranking.
David Noriega – correspondent at NBC News; see above
“Magic” Molly Young – Had one of the best Tumblrs of all time, which then turned into the brilliant book newsletter Read Like the Wind. Recently freed of her book-reviewing duties, she is available to write understated and witty magazine profiles galore. Assigning editors, snap her up before The Atlantic locks her down with a offer she can’t refuse.
Doreen St. Félix –- The New Yorker’s “Critic’s Notebook” columnist, has won all the prizes, was on a Forbes “30 Under 30” media list.
Alice Gregory – The New Yorker writer. Greatest hits include this Claire Denis profile and this story about people who accidentally commit vehicular manslaughter, a masterpiece of the form.
Molly Fischer – formerly of New York, now at The New Yorker, where she wrote most recently about divorce books and Keith McNally’s memoir. While at New York, she profiled Sarah Schulman and Adam Tooze, among many others.
Kaitlin Phillips – “Cool girl,” edgelord-y publicist with a popular Substack. You do, in fact, gotta hand it to her. Inventor of n+1 personals.
Greg Jackson – author of Prodigals and The Dimensions of a Cave. Dated Parker Posey.
Dayna Tortorici – n+1 editor, brilliant writer for all the publications; her first novel is forthcoming.
Atossa Abrahamian – journalist, author most recently of The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World.
Jordan Sjol – co-wrote the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
Namara Smith – Books editor at The New Yorker.
Becca Rothfeld – Washington Post nonfiction book critic. Author of the essay collection All Things Are Too Small.
Carla Blumenkranz - The New Yorker senior editor.
Kat Stoeffel – GQ features director.
Marc Tracy – culture reporter at the New York Times.
Thomas Chatterton Williams – author, contrarian; led the effort to write “The Harper’s Letter.”
Sam MacLaughlin – heads up the Williamsburg McNally Jackson location.
Richard Beck - author most recently of Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life .
Elias Rodrigues – tenure-track professor at Sarah Lawrence, author of All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running.
Arielle Isack – editor at The Baffler.
Andrew Jacobs - wisely went to law school, unwisely found his way back into publishing, and is now associate general counsel at Macmillan.
N.B.: There’s also a guy who worked at Palantir, but we are choosing to ignore this.
Also N.B.: Current n+1 editors Mark Krotov and Lisa Borst were both formerly interns.
VAGINA WEDNESDAY
Pelvic Organ Prolapse Is More Common Than You Think
It took writer Kailyn McCord far longer than it should have to get the help she needed.
“I pulled a hand mirror out from the vanity, put one leg up on the tub, took a deep breath, and looked,” McCord writes. “There, where I expected to see some semblance of what I knew — labial folds surrounding the recessed entrance to my vagina — I saw two soft, nearly protruding balls of tissue, one toward the front of my vagina, one toward the back, squishing together as if the cavity were trying to turn itself inside-out.” Rarefied body-horror nightmare? Sadly, no. Pelvic organ prolapse is a condition where organs like the bladder, uterus, and rectum protrude into and, in extreme cases, out of, the vaginal canal. Some research indicates that it happens to up to 75 percent of women who give birth vaginally. McCord initially saw doctors who brushed away her devastating symptoms like constant incontinence and inability to do basic physical tasks. One even told her to just do Kegels, which can actually make prolapse worse, before finding a pelvic-floor physical therapist who properly diagnosed her. She eventually found relief when a nurse practitioner gave her a pessary: a small plastic device that’s inserted into the vagina like a menstrual cup.
If you’re in NYC and have any of the symptoms McCord writes about here, email me! I have great pelvic-floor PT recommendations, some of whom even take insurance. (I didn’t suffer prolapse myself, but I did have diastasis recti, which is a whole other thing. Yes, having a human body is an ongoing exercise in humiliation and inconvenience, but it helps to know we’re not alone in our personal meat-sack hells!)
STAR WARS
Diego Luna Brings Activist Energy to a Massive Franchise
Even if he can’t admit it directly, his performance in Andor reflects his core beliefs.
![“Luna is reluctant to identify specific contributions he made to Andor, insisting instead that ‘everyone is indispensable.’ That mentality feels shaped by his [costume designer] father’s tutelage, and perhaps by his time as a teenager volunteering with an Indigenous-rights movement organized by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994.”](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r-pR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad4b086a-616c-403a-b5d4-4722f9d7f094_1170x1153.jpeg "“Luna is reluctant to identify specific contributions he made to Andor, insisting instead that ‘everyone is indispensable.’ That mentality feels shaped by his [costume designer] father’s tutelage, and perhaps by his time as a teenager volunteering with an Indigenous-rights movement organized by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in 1994.”")
Roxana Hadadi profiled the actor for Vulture's latest digital cover.
Click Your Way Out
Vanity Fair has a new editor. Sounds like he’ll be super-great at editing a magazine, based on his way with words: “You read the news every morning and it’s so operatic and it’s drama at scale — it feels like a co-production between Marcel Proust and Michael Bay.” Yes, totally. (What??)
Speaking of legacy media, here’s an interview with a magazine and newspaper veteran who isn’t afraid to talk trash about Joan Didion.
“I Think the Other Parents Are Bribing My Son’s Baseball Coach.” I think that’s not the real issue.
I guess our collective nostalgia for a glorious flop of a TV show from 2012 was not enough to sustain Smash on Broadway.
I went to a party and now I’m tired.