Fact-Checkers Anonymous
Getting a job at The New Yorker felt like an arbitrary stroke of luck. Getting fired was quite the opposite.
by Jasper Lo
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.
