A conversation with New York magazine editor David Haskell

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT COMMERCIAL TYPE, MOUNTAIN GAZETTE, AND FREEPORT PRESS.

Like many of you, I was stunned by what happened on November 5th. It’s going to take me some time to reckon with what this all says about the values of a large portion of this country. As part of that reckoning—and for some much-needed relief—I’ve opted to spend less time with media in general for a bit.

But on the morning after I couldn’t ignore an email I got from today’s guest, New York magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell. [You can find it on our website].

What struck me most about his note—which was sent to the magazine’s million-and-a-half subscribers—was what it didn’t say. There were no recriminations. Nothing about how Kamala Harris had failed to “read the room.” Not a word about Joe Biden’s unwillingness to step aside when he should have. No calls to “resist.” In fact, the hometown president-elect’s name went unspoken (as it is here).

What Haskell did say that left a mark on me was this:

“I consider our jobs as magazine journalists a privilege at times like this.”

I was an editor at Clay Felker’s New York magazine, the editor-in-chief of Boston magazine, and I led the creative team at Inc. magazine. And it was there, at Inc., that I had a similar experience. It was 9/11.

I wrote my monthly column in the haze that immediately followed the attacks, though it wouldn’t appear in print until the December issue. It was titled, “Think Small. No, Smaller.” In it, I urged our community of company builders to focus their attention on the things we can control. This is how it ended:

What we can say for certain is that the arena over which any of us has control has, for now, grown smaller. In these smaller arenas, the challenge is to build, or rebuild, in ourselves and our organizations the quiet confidence that we still have the ability to get the right things done.

For all the attention that gets paid to EICs, most of the work you do is done through the members of your team: writers, and editors, and designers, and so many others.

My friend, Dan Okrent, the former Life magazine editor and Print Is Dead guest, once said, “Magazines bring us together into real communities.”

Moments like this demand something different—something direct and personal from an editor to that community. Something that offers a challenge, but also an opportunity, to answer the question in a clear and credible way: So what do we do now?

“You can tell that the magazine has been crafted by a community of people who really respect each other’s talents.”

George Gendron: What I’d like to do this morning is something that, frankly, is of real interest to me, and that is to have a conversation with you, at least in part, about how you actually work. And I have a longstanding, absolute fascination with the whole solo phenomenon and indies and how really successful indies, mostly creatives who’ve gone off on their own and created an incredibly rich and rewarding life for themselves, how they get their work done. And so I thought, I bet it would be really interesting… to have that conversation with you, especially since you’re running an incredibly illustrious, legendary magazine, you’re a partner in a distillery, you create ceramics and sculptures, and it’s not just like a little hobby, you have a gallery representing you. So my suspicion is you probably use your time really well.

David Haskell: Yeah, sure. Happy to talk about it.

George Gendron: So you’re a busy man, and one who’s gotten a good deal of public attention. So I’d like to explore first how you actually get your work done, how you manage your time, what tools you find indispensable. So what time do you get up in the morning?

David Haskell: The Cut, which is a part of New York magazine’s “Marvel Cinematic Universe”—it’s one of our digital expressions—The Cut has a very popular column called “How I Get It Done.” And I’ve never imagined being on the other side of it.

George Gendron: [Laughs].

David Haskell: But here I am. What time do I get up? I get up at 7:50. I get a lot of sleep. That is one thing that I need. And I’m just envious of people who don’t. But if I get less than seven, it’s really a problem. And I try to get eight. So it’s like midnight to eight.

George Gendron: It’s good to hear that. I’m so tired of hearing people brag about the fact that, “I’ve accomplished everything only getting three hours of sleep at night.”

David Haskell: Yeah. Bill Clinton was the first person I was aware of whose astounding professional success was directly linked to his needing three hours of sleep at night. And I just thought, That’s unfair.

George Gendron: Yeah, but look where it got him in the end. So the real question here is you get up, I don’t know whether you have coffee or tea or something, but what do you read every morning? What do you find you absolutely have to have at least looked at in the morning?

David Haskell: The New York Times. The thing that I learned really quickly in the first version of this job—I’ve worked for New York magazine for 16 years now, and been running it for five-and-a-half—but for a decade, I worked under Adam Moss, who you’ve spoken to, and I remember when I asked him really early on, “Just how do you orient yourself?”

And he said, “You basically have to be a generalist who understands all the news at all times with enough sophistication to know what to think about the news.”

Well, that just seems an impossible thing to do. How do you do it? And it’s clear that for this job, at least the answer is you need to orient around The New York Times. And so I still get it in paper on weekends and I just go front-to-back. And then every day I try to click on the today’s paper link on the homepage that actually gives you every story by section.

And I don’t read every story by section, but it forces me to at least engage with every headline of every story in every section. And it’s a lot of very smart people’s very considered “all the news that’s fit to print.” And without doing that regularly, I feel like I would be lost.

George Gendron: It’s funny. The paper has come under a lot of criticism for a variety of different reasons. Particularly with regard to their coverage of the election. And I buy into some of that, particularly about the election. And yet, I can’t imagine life without The New York Times. There’s nothing even remotely comparable. You’d have to try to create a pastiche of seven or eight or nine or 10 different things. And yet even that wouldn’t do it. Because there is a certain kind of point of view about the world that I think you find at The Times.

David Haskell: Yeah, I think that’s true. And I think that’s true for much of the English-speaking language and how they respond to the news. But I think, especially in my job, New York magazine since 1968, has orbited The Times. It has a relationship with its readers. And like The Times it is both a national publication and rooted locally in New York City.

But it has a relationship to its readers where the readers are basically expected to be familiar with what is running in The Times, and probably a subscriber of it, and want something else out of us. I don’t think that’s literally true of our subscribers, but our basic understanding of our readership is that it is highly news-literate and accepts as a point of, sort of, foundational reference, The New York Times.

George Gendron: How do you think New York magazine readers have changed in your 16 years?

David Haskell: A few basic things. There’s a lot more of them. We’ve grown quite a bit. And when I joined, the magazine and the key people here being Adam Moss and the Wassersteins—Bruce, and when he died, Pam Wasserstein—had already made some big decisions about what our bet on a digital expression of ourselves would look like. I wasn’t there for those early stages, but back when I started our readership was mostly print and it was a kind of core and very loyal readership.

I think we’ve retained a huge fraction of that readership. But our overall pie has gotten a lot bigger. And that, to me, is very exciting. Like the two challenges that we’re always coming up against strategically, I would say, are one, we’re not just a local publication. We have “New York” in our name. We have a New Yorker’s point of view, but we take as our mandate covering the nation and, to some extent, the world.

And then the other thing is that we’re just a print magazine and we’re obviously at this point far beyond that but to make a case for ourselves as a magazine where, you know eight or nine times as many people are reading us digitally than just in print, but they’re reading us for the same qualities of what a magazine gives you. That’s the big change.

George Gendron: I want to come back to that in a slightly different context in a few minutes, but do you guys have any policy regarding how much time people spend in the office or in the newsroom?

David Haskell: We do, but it’s a policy that’s pretty nuanced because it recognizes that there’s a lot of our staff that it never made sense for them to be mandated to be in the newsroom. Most reporters can be wherever they need to be. And then, on the other extreme, some people in departments that really do need to be full-time in the office. And there’s a lot of people whose jobs are hybrid.

I go in every day. And to me, the most important thing is that the center of gravity of the magazine is literally here on the 15th floor of 85 Broad Street. And that is where you can find me every day. My direct reports and the leadership of the magazine are, for the most part, pretty much every day in the office, though we’re also not such sticklers that we can’t accommodate different circumstances.

And then the people whose jobs are much more about the creation of the print magazine have a closer connection to the physical footprint than people whose jobs are further removed from that. I mean that’s very abstract, but basically we have a lot of different rules for different types of people, recognizing that we’re a pretty complicated organism.

**Haskell (far left), with photo editor Jody Quon (second from left) and the *New York* magazine team.**

George Gendron: But that’s interesting because I’ve got to guess that, if you were to poll the crew that does show up pretty routinely, it’s because they want to be there not because they have to be there.

David Haskell: Yeah, I would guess so. I mean, that starts with me. I find this job so social and I think the reading experience reflects that. I think you can tell that the magazine has been crafted by a community of people who really respect each other’s talents and have figured out how to work well together.

And what we learned during COVID is, “Holy shit! You can do that remotely!” And we did for a long time. And we know how to turn that on when we need to, and we know how to accommodate individual circumstances when we need to.

But the trickiest things—the trickiest creative things—are hard to do remotely. And part of the problem is you just miss out on the pleasure, the joy of being in each other’s company. That really goes a long way to creating an atmosphere of creativity. I think, at least.

George Gendron: I agree with you. And yet, in a way, it flies in the face of something that maybe you didn’t grow up with—you’re so much younger than I am—but I grew up with this idea that, in a magazine in particular, it’s a reflection of whoever’s at the top, his or her sensibility. The legendary editors-in-chief, the Clay Felkers of the world. Although I actually feel what you just said about the current New York magazine could also have been said about New York back in the late sixties and early seventies, that it was an incredibly social magazine that you could almost imagine in your head, the chatter that went on in the newsroom by looking at an issue.

David Haskell: Yeah. When I read about our history—and I’ve read quite a bit about it—that jumps off the page. And sometimes people ask me, just as a playing devil’s advocate, “What is the value of being located in the city?”

We publish restaurant reviews, for instance. We have, in my opinion, the best restaurant critic working. And there’s an argument that our national readership isn’t that interested in the newest restaurant in Fort Greene. “Why do you do it?” And I just say that the grounding in a particular place is so helpful for us.

And we are so fortunate that this particular place happens to be the capital of the world, and cinematic, and outrageous, and connected to so many power clusters and so many different industries. And it’s a great, great place to be in. But being tied to a place really helps. And so I just think that’s actually literally true in terms of making the magazine also.

George Gendron: Yeah. And in terms of sensibility, right?

David Haskell: Yeah. But sensibility is the key thing. And sensibility is what makes a magazine. And it’s what makes any particular magazine, their magazine. All the other stuff is just in the service of that feeling or that amorphous thing. And there’s a lot of different aspects to my job, but one is the custodian of a sensibility and trying to figure out how to make it very clear to our readers who we are. Not literally who we are—as you say, I’m sort of a private person. And we don’t have a lot of big, bold-face names on TV all the time, but that character type of who we are is, I think, an important thing to communicate.

George Gendron: Let me ask you a question that’s both institutional and personal, since you just brought it up. Is that a conscious decision, intentional decision on your part that you’re not out there all the time, you don’t have a lot of faces? That, too, flies in the face of being in an era of influencers, of being on social media all the time, everywhere. And I think the difference is pretty striking between you and a lot of other media organizations.

David Haskell: Yeah. And I take back a little bit of what I’d said about the institution writ large. There are some very notable journalists on our staff, and people who are highly public in lots of different ways, but I’m not. So just taking me personally, the way I look at it is that it would take a lot of effort to be more public, to be a pundit on Morning Joe, to be curating an Instagram feed for a wide audience to represent who I am.

And you can do that badly. There’s a lot of skill involved in doing it. You can be good at it and still do things that you regret. You cause distraction—there’s a lot of costs. And what’s the benefit? Public attention. And I guess I just feel fortunate that I don’t think the magazine needs that of me. And I think, going back to the, like, how I get it done questions of how I organize my time, I just feel very fortunate that I can be selective about doing things like what we’re doing right now.

I’m very happy to talk about the work that we do. And I’m not shy. But I don’t think it’s my job to be a very visible editor-in-chief. It could be somebody’s job, you know. Other people could do the job differently, but I don’t have to. And it comes with a lot of cost, so I don’t really want to.

George Gendron: I could be wrong about this, but I’ve always felt that kind of public persona and even, call it celebrity, for an editor-in-chief was more valuable when it came to advertisers and sponsors than it was readers.

David Haskell: I think you’re right. There’s a lot of dynamics—there’s a lot of business interest in having a celebrity at the top of it. And some of that is undeniable and it’s a downside of having to be an editor-in-chief. In an ideal version, maybe I’d also be doing a ton of that. But I’m confident that I can do the job well without doing it. And I don’t feel a lot of pressure from my corporate overlords to do it.

I understand what you mean about advertising. And the business has changed a lot. And I should say that at New York magazine, we’re very fortunate to be anchored in a business model that is built around subscriptions as well as advertising. And that just does a lot—it’s not just in this conversation that we’re having, but when I look at what I do, there’s so much more attention and thoughtfulness and focus I can put to what a reader is going to want out of our journalism when that is the business incentive also.

And compared to generations before, or decades before me, people who run magazines—if you read Tina Brown’s Diaries for instance—there’s a lot of glamour, and there’s a lot of budget, and a lot of stuff that they’re playing with that I don’t get to. And you can be jealous of some of that, but I don’t envy their obligations to sell the advertisers often at the mental expense of paying attention to their readers.

George Gendron: I think you either have the DNA—and I think Tina has it, certainly Graydon Carter has it, maybe Graydon even more than Tina—but you either have the DNA where you don’t just tolerate it. But I think, in some odd way, you flourish in that kind of an environment. You get a kind of psychic charge out of it. Or it’s soul crushing. It really can be.

David Haskell: Yeah. A soul-crushing situation is when your heart’s not in it. I was in Milan last week for Fashion Week, and it’s the first time I’ve done that. And in a week like that, as an editor-in-chief, you go to a bunch of fashion shows and you also go to a bunch of meetings with advertisers.

So I’m actually fresh off of doing an old school 20th-century magazine editor-in-chief week. And the thing that I would just say is I’m a huge advocate for the business of New York magazine. It’s a really good business. So I’m actually, I get pretty energized in a conversation where I’m trying to show that to somebody. That part’s not really soul crushing. There’s obviously a lot of other bullshit that can be, and I’m also grateful to not have to do that much.

George Gendron: So I want to go back to the magazine. At one point, I heard you talk about—how do you phrase it—you said, “There’s the magazine and there’s the newsroom.” And I think what you were referring to was the newsroom as a 24/7, always-on operation that’s digital. As distinct from the magazine. Was that correct?

David Haskell: I like to use the word ‘magazine’ in two definitions, interchangeably. And it probably confuses people here. It is literally something that we print on paper. And then it is also the whole enterprise. And it’s really important to me that, if you’re a digital subscriber to New York magazine, you are subscribing to the magazine. You might not have chosen to get the print product of it.

And if you are a writer on our staff—we have about 230 people on staff and about half of them are really located in one of our six verticals: The Cut, Vulture, Intelligencer, Curbed, Grub Street, The Strategist—but half of that staff is centered, located, grounded in one of those verticals.

And then the other half is in a sort of centralized function. And that function, back when I started 16 years ago, the division was print and digital. Print makes a magazine. Digital, or these sort of “junior bloggers,” are seen as a kind of inferior product. That was the way the media industry thought about digital journalism a while ago.

And I think we were one of the first places to take the internet seriously. And one move that I made very early on when I became editor-in-chief is just at a kind of—literally at the level of budgets and spreadsheets—I blew up the distinction between print and digital. And I just understood that instead in our modern world, what we were talking about here is a centralized function. And then the digital site-specific functions.

And that allowed us to understand that the copy department, the fact department, the photography department, the senior editors, the writers who write across all verticals—there’s so much centralized staff that is constantly working with the verticals. Everything that runs in print lives digitally on one of the verticals. Print is one expression of how we see ourselves as a magazine, but there’s so many other entry points to reading us.

And the point of all that is that the use of the word ‘magazine’ to refer to the whole operation, I think, helps us remember that a piece that’s put together very quickly on the news, very quickly between a writer, an editor, and maybe a copy editor reading it, seconds before it goes up, and then a feature that takes all-in nine months to put together—they’re coming from the same machine. Back to that sensibility thing, they need to be coming from the same creative enterprise for it to make sense for the reader.

“I use ‘theatrical’ often to talk about what we need to be working on.”

George Gendron: Congratulations. You just managed to get through that explanation without using the word ‘brand’ once.

David Haskell: Yeah. ‘Brand’ is a tricky word. I learned something new—here’s something I picked up in Milan: ‘iconize.’ So I was speaking to a fashion brand who has not only stuff that they put out each season—a new collection—but also a storied history. And so they were talking about turning more of their storied histories, more of their back catalog, basically, into icons. And you do that through “iconizing.”

George Gendron: Iconization. Wow. Okay.

David Haskell: And and so I was like, “I’m gonna take that back—”

George Gendron: —Let’s sit back and see how long before that now just populates the internet.

David Haskell: But it was actually interesting talking to him, just to stay on that for a second, because this is a magazine that has been publishing since 1968. And when I started, our history, our legacy, the fact that we were print, that we weren’t a Buzzfeed or a Vice that are “the future”—all of that felt like a drag on us. And it’s just fascinating to see that flip.

And this, like, “heritage brand” is something that is a term that has existed in the world of fashion and luxury, and it’s basically a brand that has the value of its history. And a couple of years ago I just realized, like, “Whoa! We are a heritage brand.”

Actually, in a world where the media environment has changed so much, if you can be both alive to the present and also in real conversation with your own history, that’s something pretty unique.

George Gendron: And rare.

David Haskell: It’s a pretty exciting recipe for how to be different from everybody else.

George Gendron: Yeah. Let’s ground this now, all of this, in an explanation by you of what you do. What are your Tuesday idea meetings?

David Haskell: That’s a good example of how the machine works. The Tuesday Ideas Meeting—I suspect it existed as an institution when you were at New York magazine?

George Gendron: Yeah, but when you were a young kid, you didn’t get in there.

David Haskell: You might’ve been aware that it was happening in a room with a closed door. But it definitely predates me. And it’s, in that sense, one of the, I know it to be one of the oldest, sort of, rituals. When I started I was an editor on the Culture pages, but also a features editor. And then I became a features editor for most of my time before I was editor-in-chief.

And so I would always go to that Tuesday, 11am ideas meeting. It was a brutal, terrifying meeting in which you’re expected to pitch two or three ideas. And it’s gone through different iterations. I remember when I first started going, Adam, who led them, would answer on the spot whether they were approved or not. And he was very good at doing that, being decisive and having just brutal questions back to you.

Then that changed, and he would ask questions but withhold judgment for a day or two. That’s the scenario that I inherited. Then during COVID, we went remote and we suggested everybody submit their ideas ahead of time in a Google doc, written as a paragraph and then present them.

And that, I was afraid, would change the magic of the ideas meeting, which is alive. But actually it was really helpful to force everybody to concentrate and make a coherent pitch. And so that’s what we currently do. So anyway, the other thing I would say about it though is that the people who come to it are not only people who have that “centralized function,” but many of our senior leadership on the different verticals also.

And everyone’s invited to pitch ideas for the entire magazine. And it’s not a place where we should think about good, but small, ideas. I don’t need to be answering all of those questions, and we all don’t need to be investing an hour of our time hearing that. This is for big ideas that are going to be expensive propositions. Not just expensive in dollars, but in our own time, and effort, and energy.

And it’s really hard to go to that meeting and pitch. It’s also really hard to run that meeting. And I feel like I’ve got the best magazine staff around and they’re doing as best they can. And yet, every year or so, comes an email from me that’s just reminding everyone to keep the ambition level really high on those ideas.

Because you can have everything going for you as a magazine and still float, if you don’t work especially hard to come up with the best cover-worthy ideas. We often say, “Think the cover.” The cover demands of us a story worthy of its page. And so it forces us at least twice a month, every other week, to have a story that feels big enough that it will launch a conversation, get everybody talking, end a conversation and be the definitive story on something.

You know, like, it needs to jolt you out of your day-to-day media consumption, et cetera, et cetera. That’s the job of that cover story. And the ideas meeting is to generate enough ideas that could be covers or other big features that push us towards what we call “enterprise stories.”

George Gendron: Every magazine that I’m aware of has their own version of that. The question that I’ve always had is, you listen to people who were at, let’s say at Esquire, back when Adam was a young man there. And man, some of those story meetings were notorious for people actually breaking down at Forbes. The same thing. I remember once hiring a senior writer from Forbes, and he was coming into the first story meeting at Inc., and he looked like he was twitching.

And I said, “You okay?”

And he said, yeah, “I’m just, I’m just getting psyched.”

And later he came up to me and he said, “This is amazing. Is that typical?”

I said “Yeah.”

He said, “It was intense, but nobody cried, and nobody went to the bathroom and threw up afterwards.”

So here’s my question: My wife Sarah and I, we’re watching season three of The Bear, as probably everybody is, and of course it features a restaurant kitchen as boot camp. Then there’s the actual military boot camp, which I got to experience firsthand as a young cadet at the Air Force Academy. And then the editorial story meeting as intellectual and spiritual killing ground, if you will, as brought to you by Forbes. Do we think it’s necessary to humiliate and terrorize people in order to develop them as chefs, and editors, and warriors?

David Haskell: I definitely know that the answer is, “No, it’s not.” And the ideas meeting that I run is meant to cultivate the best ideas. And of course, part of what you’re doing is creating an environment, and standards, and expectation of excellence and ambition and all of that. And one way to do that is to make everybody afraid that they won’t measure up.

But there's a bunch of other tools in that toolbox. And so I would just say personally, though, I think all the time, Am I pushing too hard? Am I not pushing enough? I think that’s probably a common anxiety of leaders in a modern workroom.

But even though I worry about it all the time, I actually feel pretty certain—and especially having done this for a few years now and just looking back on the successes—pieces that I'm most proud of came out of the most, I guess the word is “nurturing” environments, or the most collaborative environments, where the idea wasn’t perfect at the get-go.

The idea needed to be workshopped, and therefore needed, like, enough forgiving room for everybody to just say stuff that they might be a little bit embarrassed about or, “Don’t hold me to this, but I actually think”—that kind of environment is enormously fruitful. And you can’t get that if everyone’s terrified.

George Gendron: Yeah, I think there’s a fundamental psychological principle that says that if people don’t feel safe, they spend a disproportionate amount of their time working to feel safe. So when you actually get to spend real quality time with editorial leaders, despite the incredibly disparate personalities, there is this sense that there’s this incredible psychic payoff that editors-in-chief get from creating environments where really good people can do their best work. That’s thrilling.

David Haskell: Yeah. What I try to do is give feedback that’s clarifying. Like, Why isn’t this a good idea? Or just a signal that that line of thinking isn’t where I think the magazine should be going or something like that. You need to get feedback in order for people to not spin their wheels and directions that aren’t really that useful.

George Gendron: I want to segue now—this is back to you and how you spend your time. How much time do you spend drinking your own bourbon?

David Haskell: Uh, you know, not that much, actually.

George Gendron: That’s a euphemism for “your role at the distillery these days?”

David Haskell: When I transitioned into this job of editor-in-chief, I moved out of any operating role. So I co-own it with the cofounder of the business, Colin Spoelman, my very close friend from college. We started it together. It’s his connection to Kentucky that started this whole project in the first place.

When we started, we both had “real jobs” that were highly threatened by the economic collapse, the Great Recession of 2009. And so I think in both of our heads, it was a little bit of a backup plan. But I always found it just as a project that I was working on with a friend. And for Colin, it’s been an incredible career.

And so anyway, he quit his day job eventually and has been running it for a decade. And I, for a while there, was helping out at quarter-time. And then, once the job grew into this one, I was just like, “I can’t do that.”

So he runs it. I am involved in the big-picture questions and all that. And then the ceramics project is—it’s bigger than a hobby, it’s smaller than a, whatever comes after that. I usually spend Tuesday nights at my studio and Saturday afternoons when I’m in town.

George Gendron: Where’s the studio, David?

David Haskell: It’s in Brooklyn. Actually, it’s quite close to the distillery. The distillery is in the Navy Yard and my studio is off of Flushing, just outside of the Navy Yard.

George Gendron: Is it yours or is it a communal studio?

David Haskell: I share it with somebody else. It’s mine and somebody else’s. And he uses it. He’s a full time ceramicist. And I think I’m a pretty great studio mate from his perspective because I’m only there for these concentrated hours. And I love it. I love him and also it’s just a very perfect setup for me.

George Gendron: Let’s go back to the distillery for a second. So we know the bourbon has won all sorts of accolades. Is it now a profitable, stable, sustainable business?

David Haskell: It’s funny. It is all three of those, but we’ve always run it right on the, sort of, brink of profitability.

George Gendron: Because of reinvestment, you mean?

David Haskell: Yeah, exactly. Like we didn’t raise that much money. We did a bit, but we always made much more bourbon coming off the still and putting into barrels than we were harvesting out of barrels that had been sitting around for a few years. And so here we are 14 years into the business, and that waterfall is still the defining feature of our economics, is another way of saying it. But basically, like, we’re always pushing the production as much as we can and comfortable with, really, “skating around profitability.”

“The cover demands of us a story worthy of its page.”

George Gendron: But the ultimate decision maker when it comes to strategy and how aggressive to be is Colin, I take it, with input from you.

David Haskell: Yeah, definitely. We own it equally, but I defer to him a lot for all the obvious reasons.

George Gendron: Do you spend much time over there, just socially?

David Haskell: Yeah. One of the last projects I was really in the muck of involvement with was the creation of what’s called The Gatehouses, which is our tasting room and bar. And there’s this whole history that the quirks of our distilling license in New York state allow us to serve drinks to you like we’re a bar. And they allow us to sell you bottles like we’re a liquor store. Without having either of the licenses that all the rest of the bars and liquor stores in New York state have.

George Gendron: Are you serious?

David Haskell: Yes. Because we’re a farm distillery and we have a farm distiller’s license. And what that means is almost all of our products are made by a majority of New York state agricultural ingredients. And any of those products we can serve in the tasting room as drinks. So what that allowed us to do is open, basically, a bar.

And then the coincidence—or like the amazing luck, really—of being in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is just an incredible campus with so much interesting heritage, and my relationship with the business is so much about the history of New York City, so it’s been very exciting to be in the Yard.

And there just happened to be these two historically significant tiny little castles in the original main entrance of the yard that the City of New York, which runs the Navy Yard, didn’t really know what to do with. And they invited us—we had already at that point taken over the former bank of the Navy Yard and that was our production factory. One hundred percent of what we sell comes out of those stills in that building.

Then up the road a little bit were these two little castles and they said, “Hey, you guys have any thoughts about these? They’ve got some underground storage area that’s sitting empty. Maybe you could store your barrels there?”

So we made a plan to go visit. We had to cancel the plan because there was a storm coming. It ended up being Hurricane Sandy. The entire Navy yard flooded. Back then, Sweet’N Low was still making their pink sugar packets there. And then all the streets of the yard were paved in pink packets.

It made no sense to put all of our precious whiskey underground at five feet above sea level. So we walked away for a few months on that offer of the castles. And then we just started thinking, What about above ground? And I think it was actually right around then that the State of New York changed the law to allow us to operate as a bar.

So then we took those over and did a pretty extensive internal renovation to turn it into a tasting room and bar. And, I love restaurants—I’ve worked in them at every level of front-of-house jobs, and so have always been excited to open something of my own. And so basically, the build-out of that bar was the last major project that I worked on with Colin.

And it’s still a watering hole. I recommend it for anyone who wants to get a drink at night. But also on Saturday afternoons, for instance, if I’m to-or-from the studio, I’ll often stop there and read the paper. But going back to our earlier conversation, I’ll read my physical paper in the turret of The Gatehouses in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, sipping some whiskey.

George Gendron: This sounds like Elisabeth Egan’s next novel!

David Haskell: Yeah. She’s an incredible author. And in fact, one of those “white whale” magazine journalists. She has an incredible archive of nonfiction magazine writing that she’s done over the years, though she doesn’t do it very often. And so every now and then I reach out to her and she incredibly politely declines.

George Gendron: And she’s very knowledgeable about the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

David Haskell: Exactly, exactly. She spent about five years researching in the same archives that I was in over at the Yard to try to get interesting material for decorating the bar. So we ended up having a fair amount to talk about.

George Gendron: Now one person who I know for a fact visited your distillery is a New Yorker writer who referred, in a very short piece she did, to a “John Collins,” a drink that you guys make. I know what a Tom Collins is. What is a John Collins?

David Haskell: Well, you know, The honest truth is I don’t know how to tell you how to make a John Collins, but I’ll tell you how it came about, which is, back to that special license that we have, and I was saying that almost everything we make is out of New York state agricultural products. So when we decided to create our cocktail menu, it was very exciting to us to imagine all of the classic cocktails, only made from our whiskey, made from New York state agriculture.

So we have a martini on the menu that is made from our moonshine. We have a margarita on the menu, also made from one of our infused moonshines. And then there’s all sorts of other drinks that would typically involve rum or other spirits that we do a variation of with ours.

And that little asterisk that I had—we make a single malt, which is our version of a scotch, but you can’t call it scotch unless it’s made in Scotland. But our version of that, we make that. But because it’s mostly barley, and the barley doesn’t come from New York, it’s the one thing that you can’t buy at the tasting room.

George Gendron: I’m forewarned. So given the menu—and then we’ll move on from the distillery—given the menu of what you guys are making now, what’s your personal favorite spirit?

David Haskell: The rye that we make is what I’m most proud of, and what I personally would choose to drink, if given the full fleet. We did a pretty exciting thing with other distilleries in New York state where we got together and created a designation called Empire Rye. Just like Tennessee whiskey is an official designation and there are certain things you need to do, including being made in Tennessee, that qualify for that.

We all decided on how to basically brand a commitment to making rye a certain way. And so we and other distilleries make an Empire Rye each season. And it’s an allocated, limited-edition product that tastes like the season’s rye. And there’s a couple of variations of it that we do that have to do with alcohol percentage, and finishing, and stuff like that. But I would definitely say, if you’re encountering our whiskies and wondering what to purchase, I would push you towards the rye.

George Gendron: One of my daughters writes case studies for the Harvard Business School, and you’re going to be hearing from her. This is a great case study—with rights reserved for Netflix or something like that. We have an incredible intern from Emerson College, Ali, and she requested that I ask you a question about your cats, of which you have two at the distillery. And they’re actually even listed on what we in the magazine industry might refer to as your masthead. They’re Maude and Harold. Harold is listed, I think, as chief attention officer and Maude is listed as chief napper. Now I have to ask the question: are these mousers, or are they really pets, or both?

David Haskell: The former. They’re employees of the distillery and do the job of keeping the mice out. There was a time when we moved into the Yard before we realized it would be a good idea to get a cat. And then we got a cat and in the course of a day it solved the rodent problem.

Haskell is cofounder of Brooklyn’s Kings County Distillery

George Gendron: I thought maybe this was a case of masthead inflation, but they’ve really earned their place.

David Haskell: They have. They’re loyal, beloved employees.

George Gendron: David, where did you grow up?

David Haskell: I grew up in New York City until I was 10, and then in Westport, Connecticut, for the second half of my childhood.

George Gendron: Were you a magazine junkie when you grew up, or were you 10 years old and said, “Man, I want a bourbon distillery when I’m a man.”

David Haskell: Oh, I definitely was not that. I was really interested in politics as a kid. And so actually, my interest in journalism comes from that. In high school, I guess in the ’92 election, my father took me to New Hampshire for the primaries. And we met all of the candidates, including Bill Clinton, who had actually just been dealing with the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

And so there was a thought that maybe he was coming out of the race. And I got just addicted to the race. And so that summer I had stapled onto my bedroom closet doors, the race as told by Time and by Newsweek.

George Gendron: Wait, wait. How old were you?

David Haskell: I was 13.

George Gendron: Wow, that’s precocious.

David Haskell: And when Bill Clinton chose Al Gore, and he doubled down on a Boomer—as opposed to going older, to mitigate the dangers of looking too young, but instead just doubled-down on the energy of a Boomer—that was electric for the political press. And I was not very old, but I felt it. And so I had on my walls—what I remember really are the headlines and the photography coming out of the conventions and then into the final stretch of the campaign, like we’re in right now.

And my memory is that I got Time on Monday and Newsweek on Tuesday. I don’t really know why, but I think they came one after the other. And I started to understand, a little bit, the fact that even though they’re both telling the same story, they’re doing it slightly differently. And that’s probably because there’s different people choosing how to tell it. And it has something to do with how they think of who they are as a news organization.

And so that was like, just starting to crystallize in my head. And then when I turned 16, my grandfather gave me a subscription to The New Republic. And what I got out of that was this really electric jolt of argument. And I remember, I think I have it right that Peter Beinart was writing the column in the front of the book back then, and it was just like a razor-sharp, stylishly- written argument about something. And that was so different from the Time and Newsweek journalism.

And I started to get a sense of, Okay, there’s a whole ecosystem here, and what The New Republic is doing is really, like, what a magazine is. I wasn’t dreaming of working at The New Republic necessarily, but I understood what wit, style, sharp argumentation, willingness to provoke—what that felt like to a reader, like, that’s a really addictive thing to get into.

So anyway, I would say that’s where that started. But back then, if you asked me what I wanted to do, I would say politics. I missed living in New York City. I would have loved to have worked for the mayor. And, skipping forward a lot, after graduating from college, I went to graduate school in architecture, writing an architecture PhD around history and criticism.

And so I just had this progression from being fascinated by politics and policy, fascinated by cities and urban policy, fascinated by urban planning. “Oh, what’s urban design?” Then taking pure architecture classes. And the PhD that I was writing, that I never finished, in graduate school was about Barcelona and the city’s use of architecture in the post-Franco period to define what democracy could look like. I’ve always been interested in the language of architecture, and architecture and politics, and how they serve each other.

“In a world where the media has changed so much, if you can be both alive to the present and also in real conversation with your own history, that’s something pretty unique.”

George Gendron: So this is post-Yale. You’re over in Cambridge.

David Haskell: Yep.

George Gendron: And while you’re doing this, you also launched a magazine, of course.

David Haskell: Yeah, exactly. What happened in Cambridge was that I, on the one hand, was developing my interest in architecture and urban planning and imagining that I might one day be an architecture critic, although slightly suspicious that I had anything to say, like, curious about what that would be.

And then also I started a magazine with a couple of friends. And that, to me, was thrilling. And it’s what I ended up giving up the PhD for. I brought the magazine to the city. But we modeled ourselves pretty explicitly after Granta, which had been launched—or really technically relaunched—in Cambridge a generation before us.

Although Granta was a combination of fiction and nonfiction and we were just nonfiction. And we were called Topic magazine. And every issue was about a different topic. And the project of the magazine was about assembling the right group of voices to explore each topic. All of that was way more fun and spoke to me more than being an academic.

And so after a couple of years of doing both, and winning an internal battle about whether we should forever remain a student magazine in Cambridge or could we imagine ourselves as bigger than that and move it to New York, I won that. I moved it to New York. I was waiting tables. I was editing the magazine. That’s where my magazine career really began.

George Gendron: And that brings us full circle because that’s the vehicle that led to you having a relationship, a mentoring relationship with Adam Moss.

David Haskell: Yeah, exactly. Part of what was exciting about editing Topic in New York—it didn’t pay me or any of our staff. The staff was a bunch of underemployed, smart editorial assistants in their twenties. We were all just working out of my apartment in Williamsburg trying to create a magazine.

And I would, pretty confidently, send these emails to people I admired. And I wasn’t asking for a job. I was just like, “Hey, can I send you a magazine? I would be curious about your thoughts.” And Adam was one of the people that got back to me. And he took a lot of time out of his day—at that point he was at The New York Times Magazine and offered to just take me to lunch every now and then when I had a new issue. And he would have actually read it, and he had some thoughts, and he taught me basic magazine advice.

George Gendron: Is there one thing in your mind that really stands out when you think about that mentoring relationship? One thing that you felt was really crucial in your development?

David Haskell: Yeah, I mean the fundamental thing he taught me is that you’re not publishing a bunch of discrete items. You’re creating a magazine. And a magazine has a beginning, a middle, and an end. You’re taking people on a journey and you need to be in control of, and see the creative potential, in that journey.

And that involves starting with a flourish and ending with a bang. What is the weakest piece you have and how do you bury it? How do you change the vibe and lurch people out of what they think they’re expecting into something else. All of that kind of magazine curation, which I had never really thought of before, he was the first person to show me that.

George Gendron: It’s like theater, right? It really is about pacing, and rhythm, and surprise, and expectation.

David Haskell: Oh, totally. And I use “theatrical” often to talk about what we need to be working on. The theatrics of magazine making are what distinguish us from The New York Times, for instance. And it’s not just on the level of the big ta-da of the cover, but all sorts of other manipulations of your audience, basically, and just understanding that they want a bunch of sensations.

**An example of Haskell’s ceramics work**

Or I want to give them a bunch of sensations. I want to shock you. I want to make you cry. I want to make you laugh. I want to make you moved and unsettled by a new idea. And that’s what I imagine a theater director is working for also.

George Gendron: When you think about it in that context, what a way to live a life as a magazine editor. I forget who it was, maybe it was Tina Brown who said, “Yeah, it’s getting someone to subsidize your curiosity.”

David Haskell: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

George Gendron: Listen I have, like, probably 30 more questions I want to ask, but I know that either New York or the distillery or your ceramics are calling you. So I want to ask you a question we’ve asked most of our guests and that is Jeff Bezos, or some other billionaire, offers you a billion dollars with one proviso and that is that you have to use the billion dollars—every penny of it—to start a print magazine. What would it be? What would you do?

David Haskell: It has to start from scratch?

George Gendron: Something new. Although I get a sense that you’re thinking maybe you’d want to resurrect something?

David Haskell: The obvious thing is I could use a billion dollars on this magazine I’m working on right now!

George Gendron: I thought you were going to say Topic.

David Haskell: No. It’s funny. It’s a pleasure and a privilege to talk to you, but especially right now in this moment that we’ve been joking about internally is this pivot to print in the industry. Because there’s suddenly such a resurrection of print magazines, and I love it. I think it’s so exciting. And I think we’re particularly well positioned to make a good print magazine. So we’re trying to do a lot more of that.

I noticed fairly recently that Life magazine is coming back and I think that’s such an exciting opportunity for someone, in my imagining of what it is. It’s really photography-driven—it’s a way of seeing the world through photojournalism. And I think we’re one of the few magazines that’s still really committed to it. And it’s disappointing to see it so rarely. And great magazine photography costs a ton of money. And sometimes the great stuff is incredibly scrappy.

But I would spend that money on a photography-forward, broad in its mandate, but very narrow in its sensibility—and that I think is very New York magazine, but let’s imagine this other thing. I would spend it on that kind of a production—and remind people of the pleasures—not just pleasures, but just intensity of extraordinary nonfiction photography.

George Gendron: I agree with you completely. And you’re right, there are fewer and fewer outlets for it. But when you encounter it, it’s breathtaking. Some of the work that Kathy Ryan, who we had on the podcast, has published at the magazine, some of the photographers she has featured—it just, it stops you in your tracks.

David Haskell: Jody Quon, our photo director for many years, worked for them. And I’m just in awe of her work and her team. And it’s an incredible collaboration that I think that we have. And often we work with photographers who used to have a lot more editorial work. And they don’t anymore. And that gives us an opportunity to really stand out from our peers and all that stuff. But it’s basically a loss to the world that we’re not using the great photographers of our age more often on the great stories of our age.

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