Your Whole Self

Immediately upon meeting Emily Greenhouse, the editor of The New York Review of Books, it was obvious to me that hers is a vibrant, compassionate mind with an appetite for everything: politics, economics, art, literature, music, fashion. She has a boundless enthusiasm for big ideas and, together with her staff, produces a magazine that publishes reports on everything from the labor movement in the US to the seizure of the Brazilian rainforest alongside critical reviews and essays on subjects ranging from new fiction to oceanic science. It’s a delight to try to keep up with her. As a writer for the magazine, I can testify that she is a dynamo, scrupulously fair-minded and dazzlingly ambitious—when faced with a challenging topic, Greenhouse’s attitude is not “No, I don’t think that will work,” but “Let’s find a way.” We spoke this past fall at Wesleyan University—of which Emily is a beloved graduate—for the first in an ongoing series of conversations on the art of editing.

Merve Emre: How did you go from being a tour guide at Wesleyan to being the editor of The New York Review of Books?

Emily Greenhouse: I’m a real sort of Wesleyan hometown gal, as you know. I remember that in Anahid Nersessian’s interview for the first season of The Critic and Her Publics, she begins with the paterfamilias, her analyst father, and I feel I have to begin with my father as well, a red-diaper-baby newspaper reporter who went to Wesleyan because the Ivies didn’t like his admission interview answer about the war in Vietnam. He grew up on Long Island. His parents were working-class Jews who owned a laundromat. They would deliver the laundry and notice which magazines people received, and then they would start pamphleting and flyering, and started local groups like the Long Island Alliance for Peaceful Alternatives. My father grew up really caring about strikes and protests and labor unions and then became a labor reporter for The New York Times. That sort of became my religion, in the way that labor unions had become his religion when he was a child.

We moved around a lot for his job, and I was not a terribly happy or adjusted kid. When it came time to figure out where to attend college, I just said, I’m going to go where you went. I’m going to study what you studied. He seemed to be doing work of great moral importance at an institution everyone respected: with the tomato pickers in Immokalee, Florida, with the cotton pickers in North Carolina at dawn—he was speaking for the little guy in The New York Times. So there was no question for me that I was going to work in newsprint as well.

One of the things I found so glorious about Wesleyan was that it wasn’t hustlingly preprofessional. But I had no idea what I wanted to do next, so I moved to Paris and tried to live on my own—to make sure I could hack it. I taught English to bankers and did some translation and freelance writing. But also I was dating this offensively good-looking Tunisian Marxist unemployed boxer and going out on dates all the time.

I’d become rather close with the novelist Alexander Chee, who had this wonderful blog, “Koreanish,” at the time, and was researching his second novel, The Queen of the Night, in Paris. So every few weeks he would come into town, we would go to gay clubs, find the cheapest bottle of wine we could, and have a wonderful time. Finally, he said to me, “When are you going to get serious and get a real job?” And I felt like, why would I do that? I love this life. When I was at Wesleyan, I had a writing professor, the only writer who ever taught me, Dani Shapiro, and she had said, “You’re not a newspaper person, you’re a magazine person.” She put that in my mind. So when Alex Chee told me to stop fucking around and get a job, I applied for editorial assistantships at magazines, and did three of those. That’s quite unusual for someone of our generation.

Are you more of a magazine person or a newspaper person? What’s the difference?

I really am actually a newspaper person. I’m far more a history person and a news person than a literature person. The way that I approach this work is very much speaking truth to power. But the writing I once did and that I like to read is longer and more argumentative and more ideas driven. So I did a triumvirate of assistantships. I worked at Granta, a magazine in London, and then I worked at The New York Review of Books for the cofounder, Robert Silvers. And then I went to work at The New Yorker for David Remnick. By the time he was sending me out to get coffees, it was a total breeze. I could take dictation. I could get Michiko Kakutani a copy of Amanda Knox’s book—like, she had it the same day. I was really fast at doing absolutely anything, and it was a real pleasure.

David had me read pieces before he did, and sometimes read works for potential excerpt. He once asked me to read the second edition of Susan Sontag’s diaries with excerpt consideration, and I wrote him a long memo. He, mensch extraordinaire that he is, very generously said, “You’ve written a piece, you should publish it.” So that was the first piece I published there.

It felt like happenstance that I got into writing and started thinking about criticism. I was reading things the way that one does in college, and writing a digest for my boss—it turned out that’s what writing is. And I thought, I want to be a writer. So I worked as a writer and reporter for a number of years, and then David called me one day and asked if I wanted to be the managing editor of The New Yorker, and I said yes. Then I got married, not to the Tunisian, to my wonderful American husband. I got married, got pregnant, and was very close to having my first kid when I was hired to edit the Review.

I remember when they made the announcement—the picture that circulated with it was of you, probably six or seven months pregnant. There was a lot of chatter about that, as if people had never seen a woman with child in a position like this one. Can you reflect a little bit on that photograph?

I give my publisher, the wonderful, courtly Rea Hederman, a lot of credit. I didn’t tell him I was pregnant. I just showed up for an interview extremely pregnant, probably thirty weeks pregnant, and he hired me. I had a child the week I started the job, which is, you know, an earth-shattering, atom-redrawing experience, and then I went right back to it. I think that I felt lucky for the distraction of my pregnant belly in the hullabaloo over, you know, “This young woman, the youngest person ever to edit this august magazine…” Pamela Koloff, a towering investigative reporter, wrote to me and on Twitter about how much the photograph meant to her. And a dear friend said, You’re a feminist icon. I thought, I’m certainly not a feminist icon. But because I had worked as an assistant to Silvers, who was kind of disembodied in a way, I was particularly aware of having a body.  

Bob never learned how to use a word processor. He didn’t type. So there was a team of assistants, and we all were his amanuenses. We took dictation, we cycled in and out, and it was very much a question of how he could maximize his intellectual brawn so that he was using only his mind and never had to so much as touch the keyboard. So coming into this job with a body, with this body that was so pronounced, it felt so female in a way that I didn’t feel very comfortable with, but it also, I think, made me very relatable. Being the child of a labor reporter, I think a lot about how I can relate to people I work with. I had to talk about breastfeeding. I had to talk about the fact that I might go into labor at any moment. I had my coeditor at the time and dear friend, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, exchange numbers with my husband, and was like, “If I go into labor, call.” It set a certain humanness that characterizes my work, still.

Many magazines experience a succession crisis when the big guy retires or dies, or in the case of the London Review of Books, the big woman steps aside. I’m curious to hear how you navigated the transition from Bob Silvers’s New York Review to your magazine.

I still struggle to think of it as my magazine, because I think of it so much as our magazine, yours included. It was very clear to me, again, as the kind of little guy that I am, that what was needed was for the magazine to be cracked open. It was a process of glasnost and perestroika, I always say. There was for so long only one person who was empowered to interact with writers, and that was the capital-G Great Man, Bob Silvers. It’s a small place, but there were still so many people bursting with ideas. It felt evident to me that I could walk in and copy the keys and hand them out. That’s what I think I’ve been reasonably successful in doing. I feel so proud that in these five and a half years we have been able to identify and publish and trumpet this new generation of writers and editors. It feels that we’re all following the people that we admire. We all read very broadly, and it feels quite natural.

Funny little aside: I once reported a story for Rolling Stone about a quite dangerous and terrifying drug incident at Wesleyan, this Molly bust, and interviewed the president of the university, Michael Roth. I had been friendly with Michael, and here I was on campus, recording what Michael was saying. He was very game, as always, and a few weeks after the article was published, I was approached about being on the Board of Trustees. Serving on the board at Wesleyan, I learned I am good at being an agent of progress within an extant institution.

Again, I’m thirty-eight years old. There aren’t a lot of people my age who wanted to be an assistant so many times over and over. A lot of our generation is less reverential than I am. It’s my peers who started BuzzFeed. You know, I’m not terribly entrepreneurial, but I do think that I can come into a place and help to inch it toward what it can be. I feel proud that I’ve been able to do that at the Review—building up a youthful and female and diverse crop of editors and writers.

Is something lost in not having the imprimatur of the heavy hand of the editor on every single piece? And what risks have you had to take in not becoming a BuzzFeed, a primarily digital, commercially driven publication in the year 2024, when success in the media ecosystem is so difficult, especially as a print magazine?

I’m so lucky to be as free as I am. This is scrappy, independent publishing. The people who read the Review are extremely engaged with the rigor that we bring. We are obsessed with clarity. We are obsessed with truth. We are obsessed with individual human rights. I walked into a publication that had a lot of admirers and readers already. Nothing like what The New Yorker or The New York Times has—these are really, really different organs—but there is a very engaged, feisty readership, and I knew I couldn’t screw it up. I feel that we have been able to reinvigorate it, but even though it looks different coming down the mail tube, it is still fundamentally itself.

Bob was in his eighties when he was editing the magazine before his death in 2017, and I started this job when I was thirty-two. The people I knew, the people I was excited by, and the people that friends of mine—who are much smarter than me or who go to the movies a lot more than I do—were really excited by, I could ask them to write.

As for the big stamp of the big man: I worked for years at Condé Nast, and it is often said of the editor of Vogue that she is extremely decisive. And she is. Decisiveness is really important. There have certainly been times when I have had to make decisions that displease the people I work with because the people I work with are hugely cacophonous. I’m good at pleasing many people, but I can’t please everyone all the time. I also know that my job is to help the individual writer make his or her voice as clear and as strong as possible. I’m only publishing writers who I think are rigorous, who I think are working hard to say something morally true, with style, with beauty, with intelligence. It’s an exchange between the editor and the staff and the writer. I don’t worry about not coming down with the big hand. There have been times when I’ve said I don’t feel comfortable publishing a piece unless the writer is comfortable making certain changes. But I’m not usually going to be in a conversation with a writer I out-and-out disagree with.

Have you ever published anything that you disagreed with or that resulted in internal disagreements between you and your staff? How have you managed those disagreements?

Well, the horrific war in Gaza, in Israel, has opened up a lot of divisions on the American left. At the office, I am a hinge between progressives and liberals, and between a generation that is older than me and a generation that is younger. It’s not so much that we publish things that I strongly disagree with—it would be hard for me to just draw a map of how I think borders should go, that’s not the way my mind works. But I am fairly good at posing questions to a writer within an edit to make sure she really understands how something is going to be read.

I would say the most important article I’ve had the privilege of working on in my tenure at the Review—and, you know, we won our first National Magazine Award for Namwali Serpell’s amazing, glittering, crazy piece on Émile Zola and the film Zola and the tweets of the sex worker Zola, and I worked with Zadie Smith on her Tár review, I’m very proud of so many pieces—but not long ago, I worked with Aryeh Neier on a piece titled “Is Israel Committing Genocide?” that drew the conclusion, yes, Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza. This piece taught me, and I believe it taught my staff as well, so much about the role of journalism in this moment when some of our colleagues, not just at the Review but throughout the country, throughout the world, approach these very difficult subjects on ideological grounds.

Aryeh Neier is a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, he’s eighty-seven. He started Students for a Democratic Society with Tom Hayden. He led the ACLU. He started Human Rights Watch. He created Open Society Foundations with George Soros. He helped to create the International Criminal Tribunal in the former Yugoslavia. He is a human rights attorney and really a tower in the human rights movement. I had lunch with him last summer and asked how he felt the movement was perceived today. We were talking about the work of Samuel Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale, a brilliant writer I’ve also had the privilege of publishing—and who has challenged the human rights movement for making gains that are not always equitable. Moyn is respected and interesting but he butts up against Neier, whom he reveres at the same time.

I was asking Aryeh if he feels that the younger generations have not heeded his warnings or his work, and I asked him to write a kind of apologia for the human rights movement. It doesn’t need a defense necessarily, but it felt like that would be interesting. He filed the piece in late fall, after the attack on October 7, which wasn’t the main subject of his piece. As I often do, I said, “Thank you so much for this brilliant piece”—and it certainly was brilliant—“I think it would be useful to ground it in examples.” We’re very often saying in our copious marginal notes, This feels a bit abstract. Can you please help the reader by making it more concrete with an example?

As the months rolled along, it became in part about the Iraqi Kurds, about Bosnia and Bosnian Serbs, and it became clear, as fall turned to winter, that we had to account for what was happening and the efficacy of the human rights movement in Gaza. Little by little, the piece became an assertion that Israel was breaking international human rights law, humanitarian law, which Aryeh Neier helped to draft and to create in Gaza.

When we published this piece, which was so careful and so minute and cautious in its prosecution of this, it backed into this claim with great care. It was an extremely influential piece. I know that it was read at the ICC. I mean, it really made a difference, and it really changed people’s minds. There is, of course, a place for protest, and, in fact, we must protest. But by doing the concrete work of journalism, working on a piece like this, that is the kind of protest that, to me, is the best contribution I can make. The language isn’t flowery. It’s not going to be taught in language arts classes, but it is such a testament to the importance of the written word.

Part of what you have to think about as an editor of the Review is how to balance in your pages hard-hitting investigative journalism, directed at a particular kind of issue and audience, with beautifully written meditations on, say, what differentiates women’s writing from men’s writing—such as in the sixtieth anniversary issue, published last year. How did you think about compiling that issue so it spoke to both continuity and change in the Review?

I’m so proud of that issue. It really is a showcase of some of the best of what we do. I never thought that I would be in this kind of a job, but I think that it is a social job. An issue of a magazine is not a dinner party, and it’s not a bouquet. But at the same time, I am always trying to strike a certain balance and make sure that we have something on poetry, and make sure that we have something that will make you laugh, and something shot through with political theory, and something on early modern Europe.

I remember saying, I want Timothy Garton Ash and Namwali Serpell. Namwali Serpell is a scholar and a wonderful Zambian critic and novelist, and she writes with such gregarious energy and sparkle, and she’s hilarious and wild and raunchy. And Timothy Garton Ash is a remarkable scholar of post-Soviet Europe and the post-Soviet world. He did a report in that issue on the notion of “Europe whole and free” and the state of Europe today.

We opened the issue with an essay by Pankaj Mishra, who I think is one of the most important writers working today. I’m always very jealous when he publishes anywhere else, as is his right. But this is a review that he wrote of February 1933: The Winter of Literature, by Uwe Wittstock, a book about what artists such as Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig were doing as it became clear, to many, that the Nazis were rising to power. The article is called “When the Barbarians Take Over,” and he begins by writing about what this moment felt like for these individuals. Then the piece makes a swerve, and it becomes about Modi’s India today, about Putin’s Russia and Ukraine and Georgia. I found that electrifying. We’re a magazine that hands our writers such freedom to say, Okay, you’ve assigned a piece on Germany in 1933, but actually it’s a piece about what Modi’s party is doing in India.

In the anniversary issue, we also have the spectacular, incredibly stylish Lucy Sante on Blaise Cendrars and the feisty Jed Perl on Picasso. We have AI. We have Stacy Schiff on Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and Marilyn Monroe. There’s a little bit of everything.

How did you think about changing the look of the magazine?

In the six days before my son, Eli, was born, I said, We’ve got to figure out what to do about the way the magazine looks, because I can’t have it be this screeching tabloid, as charming as that ugliness was under Bob Silvers. It would feel very fake nostalgic if I tried to recreate it. So I was able, with the blessing of my wonderful publisher, to create an art editor position, and we’ve hired the brilliant, polymathic Leanne Shapton, who’s a writer and working artist. My mind is verbal and so not visual, and she just has these remarkable, slant ideas. She once illustrated an article about the prostate with a painting of a raviolo. It was so funny and so witty. There’s just so much freedom here. We could redraw the logo every issue if we wanted. Again, we’re really scrappy and able to do the things that we want to do. 

When have you been surprised as an editor?

One example is Martha Nussbaum’s piece from the anniversary issue. Martha is an extraordinary, extremely celebrated philosopher and legal theorist at the University of Chicago, and I had most of this anniversary issue lined up by the time she filed a piece to me on the rights of whales. It was a piece that I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be moved by, but I wept as I read it, and I thought, I have to put this in—and, in fact, it needs to close the issue.

It was about the acuity of these beautiful animals. She has a section on an orca named Tahlequah whose baby was born, took a few breaths, and died. This orca carried her deceased baby with her for seventeen days, traveling miles, and at some points, other orcas carried the stillborn calf. It’s a heartbreaking and extraordinary thing to contemplate an orca doing, even as smart as we know orcas to be.

The article ends with Martha writing about the tragic death of her daughter, a legal theorist who worked on behalf of the rights of animals. After Covid, when she was finally able, Martha went to see these orcas and right whales that her daughter, Rachel, had worked with and advocated for. I found this beautiful, and it’s something that, surely because I am a mother, I connected with.

I’m hearing you say that you put your whole self into this issue, as a mother, as an editor.

You have to.