Be the Crossing Guard
Be the Crossing Guard
We can't enforce cosmic justice. But we can help the people right in front of us.
Hey fam: A few weeks ago I asked you to vote for Will Saletan to win a Webby for his Lindsey Graham project. You came through: Will won the Webby.
I want to unpack how something like this happens, because it’s not as simple as “great writer creates work of genius.” In order for a production like The Corruption of Lindsey Graham to happen, a whole mess of stars have to align.
It starts with the writer. This was Will’s baby. The first time I sat down with Will to talk to him about joining The Bulwark, he told me about his idea for a monster project about Graham’s evolution. I told him that we could make it happen.
The second piece is the editorial team. Will is one of the smartest, cleanest writers I know; editing him is not labor-intensive. But even so, a project this sprawling needs careful editing and Adam Keiper, Martyn Wendell Jones, and Ben Parker put a metric ton of man-hours into making sure that Will’s opus was the best it could be.
Then there was the production side, where Hannah Yoest created art and laid out the piece so that it would be friendly for readers’ eyes. This was a big a deal: A computer screen is not optimized for taking in 30,000 words. If we wanted people to actually read the thing, Hannah had to work magic on the presentation. (Click here for PDF or Kindle versions.)
Only after we published The Corruption of Lindsey Graham and saw the immense response did we decide to commit the resources to producing an audio adaptation of it. Katie Cooper ran that side of the project and she and Jason Brown turned Will’s short book into an audio masterpiece.
But we still weren’t done. Catherine Lowe and Barry Rubin then had to spend time building an audience for the audio project so that the economics worked.
My point is: You see Will winning a Webby, but there’s a huge team behind a project like this. It takes a village.
And underlying all of it is you.
When Will first told me about his idea, I told him that we could make it work because our business model was oriented away from daily clicks and toward delivering deep value for members.
None of this—and I mean none of it—is possible without you guys. You created the space for us to make The Corruption of Lindsey Graham. That thing never sees the light of day if not for your support.
Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.
As a token of gratitude, let me share some news: Will is working on another gigantic, deep-dive project that will be the definitive account of another key moment in American life. Look for it in early 2025.
1. Trump on Trial
I’ll have something to say about the progress of Trump’s criminal trial eventually, but my initial thoughts are that it’s depressing.
None of the key facts are in dispute. Trump banged it out with Stormy Daniels. He paid her to keep quiet. He cooked his books to hide the payment. It is what it is.
Even the legal aspects of the case aren’t really in contention: Yes, Trump committed fraud. Yes, he was running for president at the time of the hush money payment. Yes, this is a crime.
And yet . . . who knows if any of it will matter.
So today I want to shift our lens away from the wider world to a narrower focus. I want to talk about crossing guards.
Society is filled with people who quietly hold everything together. Often these are people doing the small tasks of daily life.1 People like crossing guards.