Fact-Checkers Anonymous |
Forgot Your Password?
New to The Nation? Subscribe
Print subscriber? Activate your online access
.nation-small__b{fill:#fff;}
Fact-Checkers Anonymous
Getting a job at The New Yorker felt like an arbitrary stroke of luck. Getting fired was quite the opposite.
A woman retrieves a copy of The New Yorker from her condominium cluster mailbox.
On a Wednesday evening last November, the staff of The New Yorker gathered at a marble bar in Tribeca to celebrate the retirement of a longtime “OKer”—a kind of New Yorkerism for a frocked copyeditor. David Remnick, the fifth editor in chief of the magazine, addressed the crowd, praising the new retiree’s fastidiousness and talent.
One after another, longtime staffers recounted their stories of working with this dear colleague; all of them noted his careful kindness. When the remarks concluded, the audience rushed to order, taking advantage of the last half hour of an open bar. It was only after attendees had mostly departed that I received an unusually late call from my rep at the NewsGuild, the parent union of The New Yorker union.
I headed toward the door as I wondered why he was calling. A growing feeling of menace spread through my body. “Don’t want to hide the ball, dude,” he said, “they just fired you,” I scoffed, my voice echoing against the surrounding buildings. Why me? I wondered. I had finished my three-year term as the first vice chair of the New Yorker Union the week prior. Condé Nast had violated our collective bargaining agreement and broken labor law dozens of times, but it had never attempted something as reckless as illegally firing union leaders. As the magnitude of the violation set in, the world began falling away, and, with equal gusto, I began to sob.
Six years after my joining The New Yorker’s storied fact-checking department, my career was reduced to a three-sentence e-mail. It cited “gross misconduct and policy violations,” and was signed by Condé’s head of labor relations, a figure whose compulsion for passive-aggression has earned her a certain level of infamy among media unions. Thankfully, this lack of justification was quickly filled by an outpouring of support from colleagues, frustrated messages that underscored the arbitrary nature of the ouster. It was a welcome surprise to see the many writers I’ve worked with, who routinely confront power and describe it with such elegance, write in my defense. Patrick Radden Keefe illustrated it perfectly in a collective action where staff replied-all to an e-mail sent to executives and staff, demanding my reinstatement: “This feels like the sort of hasty decision that would be relatively easy to reverse in the near term—and more complicated to unwind the more time is allowed to pass.”
The “misconduct” in question may have occurred earlier that day. On November 5, 2025, I joined a dozen other shop members to ask an executive about the shuttering of Teen Vogue and about the many layoffs that had ensued as a result. When we encountered the head of HR, we asked if the company had closed the magazine to preemptively comply with the Trump administration’s campaign of dismantling American journalism. One of the participants of the march recorded the exchange, and the video made its way to social media, with the caption, “brutally awkward.” It registered over 1.4 million views. In response to our question, the executive told us to go back to work in a convoluted, lawyer-trained way. Three of my colleagues at other Condé Nast publications, Alma Avalle, Jake Lahut, and Ben Dewey were also fired, two of them former leaders of their union. (There are two unions in the NewsGuild, The New Yorker Union and Condé Nast United.)
It has been maddening to watch a company discard me after years of our weathering the news together. Since the fall, I have tried not to internalize its portrayal of me as a criminal. I know that I stood up for what I believed was right. Our union celebrates stories of members doing this kind of thing: organizing to stop bullying bosses, negotiating wages and longer parental leave. I kept replaying the moment in the C-suite hallway. I had stood quietly while union members posed a series of questions to an executive who had invited employees to bring him their concerns—searching for some act of gross misconduct, if that were even the incident in question. Our contract has a “just cause” provision, which means that the employer must provide a burden of proof to dismiss an employee. Furthermore, without evidence of my “misconduct,” the company violated the National Labor Relations Act, which created the right to engage in collective action and protection against being fired for participation in those actions. But maybe the bosses simply saw an opportunity in the larger authoritarian entrenchment we have been witness to, where truth or fact, as Hannah Arendt wrote, “depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”
Every spring, Columbia University’s journalism school hosts a career fair where students are matched with publications that the program deems most likely to hire. It had long been a dwindling market by the time of this fair in 2019. I visited the tables for the Military Times, the Daily News, and Newsday, but I remember noticing the name Michael Luo on the vendor list. I recognized his name from a Times article about the 2016 presidential election. In the piece, Mike described being told to go back to China by a white woman on the Upper East Side. It was a catalyzing incident that cut through the mucky microaggressions that defined Chinese American racism at the time.
At the career fair, Mike sat at a folding table behind a line that snaked around the expo floor. I had doubts about approaching him. After all, the school had made it clear that I had no business meeting him. But later that day, I saw him grab his sports jacket. I walked over and greeted him, and he introduced himself as an executive editor of The New Yorker.
Mike and his colleague David Rohde asked me what I wanted to do in journalism. Nearly all my classmates were just out of college, while I was turning 31, my career deferred by a stint as a US Army officer. I thought that delay had put me miles behind. I told Mike and David that I was starting out in journalism and I was looking for a rigorous job to catch up for lost time. Mike asked if I wanted to fact-check. “Sure,” I said, having no idea what that meant. David drafted an e-mail on his phone, turned it to me, and asked me to write myself a message. Afterwards,........