Public Writing and Asian American Studies

This forum on public writing and Asian American studies is based on a panel moderated by Dr. Oliver Wang (California State University-Long Beach) for the 2017 annual meeting of the Association of Asian American Studies. We thank Oliver Wang, an Amerasia Journal Editorial Board member, for transcribing the panel and suggesting that we post it publicly on the Amerasia blog, as well as the participants, for generously allowing us to share their thoughts.

• Hua Hsu, associate professor of English at Vassar College and recent author of The Floating Chinaman. Frequent contributor to The New Yorker and formerly, Slate.com, The Atlantic, and Grantland.com.
• Helen Jung, editorial board member at The Oregonian since 2014. Previously a reporter with the Associated Press, Seattle Times, andWall Street Journal.
• Traci Lee heads NBC Asian America, which publishes both news and editorial content pertaining to Asian American social, political and cultural issues. Previously a multimedia producer for MSNBC.
• Viet Thanh Nguyen, professor of English at USC and author of The Sympathizer,The Refugees and Nothing Ever Dies, as well as serving as a critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and an opinion writer for the New York Times.
• Oliver Wang (moderator), professor of sociology at CSU-Long Beach, arts/culture writer with NPR, KCET, the Los Angeles Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Author of Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crew of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Moderator’s Note: The goal of this panel was to bring together both academic writers and journalism editors to talk about the practical ways that Asian American scholars can bridge their work to public audiences. This is a constant challenge in academia; the profession tends to encourage specialists to primarily write for other specialists, thus alienating those outside of that potentially insular community. However, there are myriad examples of how scholars are able to reach broader audiences and this panel was assembled to discuss those possible paths.

Oliver: Hua and Viet, you both have distinguished academic careers but also write for public audiences. How did you get started with the latter?

Hua: It goes back to being a kid. When I was in middle school and high school, I always dreamed of being a journalist, but there were never any Asian names in any of the magazines I read. I kind of assumed it would be impossible [for me to get published] so I started making ‘zines. I gave you [Wang] one of my zines and you got me published in URBMagazine.

Oliver: Did you see writing journalism and criticism as part of your academic pursuits?

Hua: I was into culture and I loved reading cultural criticism in the ‘80s and ‘90s but I had never really thought about it in relation to an academic career. There were a lot of outlets at the time, so it seemed like a fun little sideline pursuit.

Oliver:  Your academic and journalism careers have grown, seemingly, in parallel with one another. Was it important for you to keep a foot in both?

Hua: I started graduate school in 2000 and at the time, it was pretty unusual to write for both popular and academic audiences. I was writing music criticism on the side and none of my dissertation advisers knew. At the time, it would have seemed really unserious. It wasn’t until I was almost done with my coursework and dissertation that I told my advisors that, “oh, I actually write journalism on the side.” Even then, it wasn’t a frosty reception, but it was sort of a, “oh, that’s an interesting hobby to have.”

So, for whatever reason, that’s just the way that I’ve always conceptualized it. That’s probably why a lot of my journalism, even though it orbits the same set of questions that my academic work is interested in, they’re pretty separate. I do write about things that I teach about but while I write a lot about music, I don’t do any academic work on music.

Oliver: Viet, how about you?

Viet: Well, my parents are hardcore academics. I spent my entire life in academia and being steeped in theory and academic criticism and so on. I also was a fiction writer at the same time so I realized I was interested in reaching other kinds of audiences. Even as an academic, I really liked those kinds of writers who were essayists like James Baldwin andAudre Lorde.

When I became an academic, one of the ways that I blew off steam was to start my own blog. No one was really going to publish me separately from my academic work, so I decided to do it myself. I started a blog called DiaCritics.orgwhere I boasted that it was the leading online resource for Vietnamese arts, culture, and politics. I don’t suppose I had any other competition though and that was a way of creating a platform where I could write whatever I wanted to write which was oftentimes not just plainspoken criticism but also satirical things. I was also harnessing other people who had the same interests and we created this collective body of work.

I had also been publishing a few op-eds here and there on relevant topics to my research. Then, of course, the fiction took off and all of sudden, people cared about what I had to say. So, when that opportunity happened, I was ready to take advantage of it. I wasn’t an academic who, all of a sudden, had to write an op-ed. I had already written a bunch and done a lot of blog writing, so when New York Timescame calling or Time Magazineor Los Angeles Timesor whatever, I was ready.

Oliver: How early did you realize you had an interest in fiction?

Viet: Oh, that was when I was a kid. In college, I was doing that too. Pragmatically speaking, I knew I was a better critic than I was a fiction writer at that age. So I was strategic about what kind of writing would bring the money and academic writing was going to bring the money in, sadly.

Oliver:  I have never heard anyone say “academic writing was going to bring the money in.” That’s amazing.

Viet: That was my day job!

Oliver: Traci, how did you get started in journalism?

Traci: My parents were immigrants. They came here when they were very young, but the way they learned English and about American society and culture was to watch the news. I was that nerdy kid who would beg my parents to let me watch the evening news before we ate dinner. I used to always do little newscasts with my stuffed animals while everyone else did tea parties. I don’t know if my parents really saw it as a career. They thought it was that thing I used to do with my stuffed animals in my bedroom. I never thought I could be a journalist because you didn’t see a lot of Asian American men or women doing the news besides Connie Chung and a couple of other people, but it was like they somehow got a special exception.

I went to school at UC Irvine and they had a great literary journalism program. I wanted to be a magazine writer but when I graduated, there were not a lot of magazines that were hiring and so I started a blog. I would write about this intersection between pop culture and Asian America.I would write about television, I would write about fashion, just whatever I was thinking about. It was not edited and it was not something I thought anyone was reading, but when I started applying to internships, one of the things that I would do was submit clips.

I had news clips from my college paper, from alternative magazines, but I would mention my blog. My first internship hired me because they liked something that I had written on my blog. From that, I got an internship doing web production and I went to NPR after that. It was also because they liked my blog. They liked that I was using Twitter at the time in order to integrate my storytelling and things like that. From there, I was hired by Microsoft to help start MSNBC.com. I don’t want to say that it was all due to blogging, but it essentially was.

Oliver: Now that you’re at NBC Asian American, what do you focus on?

Traci: NBC Asian America is the largest English language national news platform for Asian American resources, news, features, and we do documentaries. It’s a whole variety of things and we try to be inclusive as possible of all facets of the API diaspora, but at the same time, we recognize that there needs to be more voices out there so we try to open up the audience base. We try to get people to just put more content out there because there’s a need for it.

Oliver: Helen, where did your interest in journalism begin?

Helen: I started writing little stories and poems when I was a kid because writing had always seemed like a forgiving way of expressing yourself. When I went to college, my sister suggested that I try out for the student newspaper and I loved it. You got sent to these events and you end up talking to people and covering things that you would have never come across outside of your world or your path. It was constantly a learning experience. 

It was also personally gratifying. You talk to a whole bunch of people and condense what they say into just a few sentences and so you need to do that with integrity and accuracy. It’s not just about getting their quote right, it’s about getting their intention right and the context right. Being able to do that is humbling in a way.

After college, I got a job at the Seattle Timesand from there I worked at the Anchorage Daily News, the Associated Press, and the Wall Street Journal, before coming to The Oregonianin 2004. Most of it was business reporting but there was also court reporting, breaking news, just each one of those places where there was a chance to see or learn something new about a culture that I knew nothing about.

Oliver: You were a reporter for many years but you’re now on the editorial board. Can you explain what that means?

Helen: I left the news reporting side, the objective side of the paper, to join the opinion side. We are a board of five people. Three of us are the writers and we consider various issues and endorsements of candidates or telling a legislature to do this and to tell them to stop screwing around, that sort of thing. We write the unsigned opinions on the behalf of the newspaper. Our job is not the straight news reporting, it’s advocacy.

We solicit op-eds from the community and edit them down with the interest of providing a wide range of voices on different topics. Some people assume that we pick only the ones that agree with us, but, in fact, no. We actually prefer ones that don’t.

Oliver: Traci and Helen, both of you must spend time with writers to help them engage with a broader audience. What is that process like?

Traci: At NBC Asian America, we are big fans of the elevator pitch: it’s the idea of getting in an elevator with someone you want to impress and you get two floors to do so. [I urge writers to consider] the “so what?” factor. I think everything is interesting so sometimes I will approve things and my deputy editor will be like, “I don’t get it. So what is interesting about this”?

We constantly ask our writers “so what, so what, so what?” until they can answer in two sentences. Some people need longer to explain a concept but if you can’t explain in two sentences on the internet, someone is going to click away immediately and they’re not going to read it. The point of publishing an op-ed is not for your own benefit. It is to speak to a larger group of people who are maybe not familiar with that topic and if you can’t even explain it in a quick sentence or two, then no one is going to read it. That ends up being our biggest problem.

It’s not like we want you to speak to us like we’re five years old. Imagine you’re having coffee with a friend who went to the same college and is equally as intelligent as you are, but they didn’t study the thing that you studied, so how would you tell them about this concept?

Oliver: The elevator pitch doesn’t seem very different from an academic abstract: they distill an article or argument into a summary form so the reader can decide if they want to read further.

Traci: It’s the idea of: “what’s the thing that is going to hook me in to make me want to read more?”

Helen: A lot of times, we will get submissions from people where they don’t see that they’re writing things all in jargon. They’re so involved in the industry or research or whatever that it’s second nature. One of the things that I find that gets people out of their jargon-speak is throwing them on their heels by asking, “why does this matter?” Until they can explain this in one clear sentence, why I should care then?

There seems to be a proliferation of certain words that people love to use regardless of the industry like “repurposing” and “robust” and “scalable” and “innovative” and things that have lost their meaning because they’re just everywhere. What we try to get from people is for them to back off those really common words or those ten-dollar words and unpack them on a level that is much more plain English. As the expert, you have to find a new way of explaining something that is a nuts-and-bolts way of doing it as opposed to shorthand of acronyms and jargon.

Oliver: I’m curious to ask Viet and Hua: both of you write for both academic and popularaudiences. Do you have a writing style for each that you switch between?

Viet: I think there’s a spectrum. The writing styles mutually influence each other, so what Helen was saying about jargon and etc., that’s totally applicable in the academic sphere as well. It’s always interesting for me to read draft op-eds from academics who ask, “what’s your advice on how to get this thing published,” and I’m like, “first thing you got to do is cut out the jargon and speak clearly and plainly.” That has ramifications for academic writing too. For example, my academic writing and grant writing has benefitted tremendously from cutting all the jargon. Even academics don’t want to read jargon, especially from academics from other disciplines.

I think that the two types of writing always mutually influence each other because in my op-eds and my popular writing, I try to be theoretical. I don’t use big words, but I ask myself how I introduce a theoretical concept or frame. People don’t know that I’m doing it to them, but I know there’s some Marxist analysis going on. Vice versa, if I’m writing an academic book like Nothing Ever Dies, it’s saturated with what I learn from op-ed writing like how to tell a story or how to introduce your personal voice, those kinds of things.

Hua: I feel similarly to what Viet just said. My style of writing is the same across the board. It’s just about where I spend more time.

I am interested in how to explain things without being condescending to audiences. I think one of the biggest problems when academics try to translate their works is that they think that they need to condescend the audience, but I think we can aim a little above someone’s head and get them where you need them to go.

I think narrative journalism—including criticism—teaches to tell a story about a piece of art, about a text. So, for me, it has to start from an anecdote or a moment and you unpack that into a larger piece. I was at a Ph.D. program last week talking to some graduate students and I said something to the effect of, “When I was in graduate school, I think the pressure is always to try to impress the smartest peer in the room, but now that I know that I’m incapable of that, I would rather communicate with everyone else.”

Oliver: We’ve been talking about one particular form of writing—the op-ed—as a useful bridge between academia and a general readership. Helen, given your expertise on the editorial board at The Oregonian, what kind of advice would you offer to someone wanting to pitch an op-ed?

Helen: I think there’s a few key things that I use myself. First of all, you have to know what audience you’re going for. Do you want a newspaper audience, which is a general audience? Do you want a specific audience, a scholarly subset? If you’re writing for a general news audience, I go through this exercise where I ask myself, 1) “what is the most significant point that I want to make?” and, 2) “what is the outcome that I want to see?”

Answering those two questions helps frame what I’m going to write about and that helps me in terms of structuring it. I spend 50 percent of my writing on the first three or four paragraphs and that’s because I am answering those questions. I am laying it out and the rest of the editorial comes so much easier if you have that investment at the top because it tells you where you’re going to go. It’s a map to the reader as well as the writer: “this is what I want to leave people with and so the body is going to have to support that so this is where I’m headed.”

Oliver: One of the big differences between academic vs. journalism publishing is that academic writing is peer-reviewed on the front end and copy-edited on the back end but what’s often missing is what comes between. In journalism, that’s called line-editing, which is all about structure, prose, diction, style, etc. Traci, can you explain what you’re doing, as an editor, when you’re working with a submission?

Traci: We don’t ask you to send in copy that’s ready for print, that’s what an editing process is for. We go through a back-and-forth with our writers. My team is me and one other person, so there’s two of us. One of us will ask, “is this what you’re trying to say and if it’s not, can you call me and let’s go through paragraph by paragraph.” We spent a lot of time because we find op-eds to be very important for our communities, but we just want to make sure you’re getting across what you’re trying to say and enough people are clicking on it.

Oliver: I’ve had that very kind of phone conversation with newspaper editors before but in all my years of academic writing, I’ve never had a journal or anthology editor line-edit me. What are you looking for in terms of printable copy?

Traci: We don’t like big, block paragraphs of text. It doesn’t look good to publish [that on the web]. If we see that, we try to break it up. People will say, “but these thoughts go together,” but it doesn’t matter because, on the web, people are just going to keep reading.

We will cut out adverbs. People like to write transitions like “however” and “in addition.” We try to cut those out. We’ll try to basically cut things down to 700 words and then we will add back from there. If you can’t say what you’re trying to say in 700 words, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say in the first place.

Also, one of the things we look for is sourcing. We want to include inline links. We want to be able to say, “if you don’t have time to explain it here, I’ll just click out to this link.”

Oliver Wang: For Viet and Hua, as writers, what kind of advice would you give to someone just beginning to navigate this world?

Hua: I would totally agree with the block text thing and it’s all thanks to high school journalism, just the idea that on a typical magazine page, and even more so with web design, you want multiple entry points. You want the eye to enter into the text wherever, so the idea of having shorter paragraphs is really beneficial in journalism, but I think it can work as well in academic writing. I think as a result of a fetish for these entry points, I’m really obsessed with sentence transitions from paragraph to paragraph.

Even more so, I’m totally obsessed with the first line and the first paragraph of every piece. If I had the first sentence of a 1600-word piece done, I think I’m 90 percent done even though at 4 am I’m like, “I’m not 90 percent done. I made a horrible mistake.” Like right now, I have a piece due in two days and I have 900 words done on a 1600-word piece, but I don’t have the first paragraph written and I feel like completely lost.

So, I think it’s important to set a tone and establish a scene. The internet has made it so exhausting to read things on the internet that having a more narrative lead or having a lead that sets a scene, something that grows out of an anecdote, helps captures personal experience, but also the larger gears of history. If you have something that bridges the two, it can be really good and I think academics can benefit from that as well.

The other thing, journalism is more forgiving now in regards to first person. Even really old school places like the New York Times, first person is fine and I think part of what an academic is doing when they address public audiences is that they’re performing the role of an academic. I think you can allow yourself to build in a sense of, “when I began researching this,” or “research brought me to this.” Be more narrative, explain the journey that is culminating in this research or culminating in this position. I think academics feel uncomfortable about doing that or at least when I was in graduate school, it was really unusual to read anything first person except the really cool preface to the book.

Viet: A really important lesson for me was realizing that the op-ed was not simply a separate part of my life but it was an important training ground for sharpening a particular kind of writing. Writing for non-academics could actually have a transformative impact on academic writing. That desire to reach a larger audience, to express your message clearly, to use narrative, all of these things have a function in academic writing as well. I think they can make academic writing better.

The other advice I have is that you should practice, practice, practice. When an academic first starts out to write an op-ed, he or she is working against, usually, years and decades of habit and training around an assumed audience that is not the same as most op-ed situations. It takes practice to get them out those habits and be able to write in some other fashion. Now, if I’m asked to write a 1000-word op-ed or a 2000-word essay for a mainstream publication, I can do that in a few hours. Now it’s natural and I can pull that off, but that took effort to get to that situation where it became a reflex to do what Traci and Helen are saying: establish a voice, find a narrative, use an anecdote like what Hua was saying. All of these things that are tricks of narrative writing that became natural through practice.

To refer to the stuff that Hua was saying, there’s nothing wrong with using “I” or an anecdote or anything like that. One of the things you do when you’re writing an op-ed or a short piece of writing for a mainstream audience is you develop a voice. You can’t just be the professor. You’re not there to just give your expert opinion. You have to have a voice and that voice has to be more personal in some way. You don’t have to confess your life, but it has to be more personal and it can only be better for your academic writing when you develop that voice.

Oliver: I wanted to shift over to a more philosophical set of questions about the importance of writing, especially by scholars, in this current moment. It feels like one of the distinguishing qualities of the political climate is an anti-intellectual distrust of scholarly expertise. At times, I feel like simply having a “Ph.D.” after your name puts some readers on an automatic defensive. Given this climate, why do think it’s important for scholars to find ways of writing for broader audiences?

Viet: I think some of it is genuinely anti-intellectual. People just don’t want to hear from this class of people, but sometimes it’s valid. People don’t want to hear people speak in incomprehensible jargon to them, right? I’ve always taken it seriously, these ideas of the organic intellectual, the public intellectual, and so on. We have gone into this profession of ideas because we believe in the ideas. If we believe in the ideas, we need to believe that decent, rational, intelligent people can understand these ideas, but it’s our job to figure out a way to speak in a language to transmit these ideas.

We need to either translate them or focus on one part or demonstrate these ideas in actions, but this is a really crucial part of what we need to be doing as academics or intellectuals who believe that ideas can have a transformative impact outside of our particular narrow circle. This can be really uncomfortable. We spend decades in our graduate seminars and universities and we’re treated as experts and then we have to go in meet the op-ed editor who says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It’s very humbling for people. I think that’s one reason why some academics don’t want to make that effort. They don’t want to retool themselves or retrain themselves, but we must. We must if we really believe in our ideas.

Hua: I totally agree with that. It’s important within our profession to have these conversations and encourage ourselves to rethink what it is that we are doing and who we’re doing it for. It’s also just making our work more open access. We need to rethink the deals that our libraries have to make with publisher journals.

I think I have a very floaty, weird, touchy-feely, not at all concrete, approach to thinking about the impact of the word. I don’t think it’s always going to be someone reading content. It’s also about seeing new faces and names out there. I think just entering spaces will cause some change. I don’t know what it is, but it’s necessary.

Traci: When I was in college, the student activism against University of California tuition increases was consistently a big thing. There were these two strains of ideas when it came to protesting. Somebody said to me, “I can stand in front of a building and yell at it and expect people to ask me why I’m yelling or we can explain why we’re yelling at this building and then go yell at it together.”

I think because of the internet and how it’s so easy to tweet your opinion or write a comment, there isn’t enough explaining about why there’s anger. I think at a place like NBC, where journalism and the mainstream media is under attack these days for a variety of reasons, there needs to be more elevating and advancing of the conversation. As writers for the news in general, our first job it is to inform.

This became very clear to me early on when I first started this job. I was speaking with a group of activists and one person said to me, “you know, I have my son read your site in the morning sometimes and we’ll talk about some of the articles because we’re not in a very diverse community and there are no ethnic studies at his school so we’ll talk about stories sometimes.”

To me, that’s a privilege, being able to educate and inform. It is a source of information where people are being influenced in not only the way that they think, but the way that they interact with the world. I would hate to think that we don’t need academics to contribute to that because we do. We shouldn’t live in a bubble where we think somebody in their ivory tower has nothing to say to us. That attitude just creates more division. We need to find those mediums and those sources and platforms where we can come together.

At this point, we turned to audience questions. The first person asked about simple, practical, “do’s and don’t” advice for students learning to write.

Oliver: The advice that I’ve given throughout the years is that the vast majority of opportunities that you’ll get to write is simply because you asked for it. Editors always need new writers because the turnover in freelance writers is so immense. If you can turn in vaguely clean copy and do it on time, that’s practically 80 percent of it right there. People are afraid to even pitch but it’s not that scary and once you can develop a relationship with aneditor, things can take off quickly from there. All it takes is just asking. I guess my advice then is “do pitch.”

Traci: I don’t want to say blog everything, but find the outlet where you don’t need worry whether it’s being published or not to practice your writing, even if it’s just your own notebook just to write out everything that’s in your head.

Viet: Don’t write in jargon and do tell a story.

Helen: Know what it is the point you want people to take away. Let that be the organizing theme in terms of what your focus is going to be. Also, don’t get so worked up about the writing. I love beautiful writing but I also really value information. The Wall Street Journalis fantastic at this. The writing doesn’t get in the way of actually giving information that pulls you along. The stories are so compelling because they’re so sharply reported.

I think sometimes when people are trying to translate what they know, they feel like they need to use these big words. They need to make it sound really smart and that’s actually what drives people away. Just speak in plain language.

The next question was about the challenge of writing about complex issues where you want to balance legibility with nuance.

Traci: It’s not so much that you need to sacrifice all the nuance. What we were saying earlier was about leading with something that can pull a reader in and when you get a couple of paragraphs down, then make those [more complex] points. That’s the reason why you’re writing an op-ed, you have that expertise. Definitely don’t feel like you need to sacrifice. I think you can still make those points and include research and data that will be relevant, but you need to hook a reader first.

Helen: You can always include a paragraph where it states that “this is only one of many reasons of blah blah blah blah” and I think that most readers can recognize that you are presenting something relatively narrow, but you can say there are these other concerns as well and just keep it strictly focused on that one.

Viet: If it’s an op-ed for example, you’re working under constraints such as a word count of 700-1000 words. It’s not a lot of space. I think the solution is you get to make one point. You have to figure out what that one point is and that allows you to do nuance and subtlety. I think most academics go, “Ah! I don’t have just one point. I have a whole gigantic argument that I need to make,” and you just can’t do it. You have to figure out what the one point that you can then stress and tell a story about. You may have room leftover for graphic information or qualitative data and so on, that’s where you fit it. That allows you the space to get some more nuance in there.

For example, I just wrote an article for the New York Times Book Reviewabout Vietnamese and Vietnamese American literature about Vietnam. I talked about two or three books in the foreground and I spent a paragraph about these books and one paragraph where I cited 15 other books.

Hua: Another thing I would like to add is that relationships between writers and editors can be adversarial sometimes, but it’s important to remember, presuming that there’s mutual respect, that you both just want the work to be good. Good might mean something different for each of you and that involves compromise.

I have a friend who recently started writing for more popular outlets and every single edit hurts him and I don’t think you can go on like that. You have to say, “I will make these changes, I will let you cut this other stuff, but you can’t take these parts away from me.” You have the right to say “I need to keep this in, but I will do these other things.” Just learning to negotiate is important.

The next question was about kinds of assignments might be useful to include in an introductory college class about journalism.

Traci: I think a lot of journalism professors like to ask their students to interview current journalists about their jobs. That is a useless exercise and it annoys journalists. I will get students who’ll send me questions in an email and they want me to write my response back and they want me to do their assignment for them.

What’s more productive is to give them an assignment to call a police station and obtain public information records. In one of my introductory journalism class, we were given an old case that that had already been solved, but we were given the information around it and we couldn’t use the internet. We had to figure out who the public information officer was, know our rights as a journalist, and what we were allowed to obtain.

Viet: For me, learning how to write involved reading a lot. If you read a lot of journalists, you figure out the ones that are really good writers and ones that are really bad writers and learn by their examples. Immerse yourself into the work of writers who are really good in terms of whatever kinds of journalism they do, whether its op-eds or street reporting or whatever. Identify the writers you admire and imitate them. This is a basic writer’s technique: imitation first and then develop your own voice.

Audience member had a question for Viet regarding writing a group blog, similar to DiaCritics.org, and how that furthers a mission of “educators creating larger projects of scholarship.”

Viet: I think that’s exactly right. That’s what the blogs do. If you don’t see a blog out that does what you want it to do, start your own. It’s very exhausting to write your blog on a constant basis, but you can get a bunch of likeminded people.

They often make good teaching pieces because they’re [shorter] and written in a very accessible way. Theydemonstrate AsianAmerican studies knowledge but presented in a non-academic fashion. We’re scholars that write articles and essays and books. Those things can be publicly accessible. There’s nothing that says that you can’t write a book that an undergraduate or an intelligent person who’s not an academic can’t read.

Sidebar: Who do you enjoy reading, both past and present?

Helen: Charlie Pierce at Esquire. Also, Meghan McArdle. I love her writing because she takes incredibly complex subjects and really boils it down for her audience. She’s just a really interesting writer. It’s going to be a Libertarian take, but again, just the way she deconstructs healthcare in a really jargon-clear way. She is spectacular at that.

Traci: I love everything that Tom Junod writes. He wrote one about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood that I still think about all the time. Just the way that he’s able to tell a story. He also wrote a great story about 9/11, about the falling man photo, and it’s one of the best ledes that I’ve ever read in journalism, but he just manages to captivate in a paragraph that makes you want to read twenty more pages and he will often write these twenty pages and he’s wonderful.

Viet: If you look at the New Yorker’s Asian American writers: Hua Hsu, Jia Toletino. There’s Tina Nguyen at Vanity Fair, she’s been writing some pretty good stuff recently. Outside of that, I like Mike Davis, James Baldwin, Franz Fanon, these writers will do it for me.

Hua: I like Mike Davis. I read a lot of Joan Didion, just because I like how inscrutable she is. I think as far a contemporary writing, I don’t get to read as much as I like, but there’s this guy at the New Yorker, Ben Taub. He’s this incredible reporter and more importantly he has this incredible interview on Long Form where he talks about how he became one of the leading reporters on Syria. It’s a totally absorbing story about this Princeton sophomore who decided to become an expert on the conflict in Syria.

Oliver: Baldwin is an easy answer. He’s the reason I ever wanted to become a writer to begin with. There’s two writers that I tend to turn to whenever I ever get stuck and it helps me to read other people’s writing to unlock things for me. One is Luc Sante. The other is Hua. Whenever I feel like “I don’t know how to do this,” I read his stuff and it helps me rethink the approach to my own stuff.