The New York Review of Books has installed two editors to lead the magazine after being without a top editor since the sudden departure of Ian Buruma in September. Rea Hederman, publisher of the intellectual journal, announced Monday that Emily Greenhouse, 32, and Gabriel Winslow-Yost, 33, have been named co-editors, and that Daniel Mendelsohn, a longtime contributor to the Review, will assume the newly created role of editor at large.
The shared-power arrangement echoes the history of the magazine, which was founded in 1963 by Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein and edited by the pair until Epstein’s death in 2006. Silvers then maintained control of the publication — with monomaniacal focus, by all accounts — right up until his death, at 87, in 2017.
The announcement of the new editors comes more than five months after Buruma, Silvers’ successor, left his position amid an uproar over the publication and ensuing defense of an essay about the #MeToo movement by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian radio broadcaster who had been accused of sexually assaulting women. Soon after Buruma departed, the magazine issued a statement acknowledging “failures in the presentation and editing” of the essay.
Greenhouse and Winslow-Yost both have experience at the storied publication they will now lead. Greenhouse was most recently the managing editor of The New Yorker. She worked at the New York Review in 2011 and 2012, as an editorial assistant to Silvers. Winslow-Yost began working at the Review, also as an editorial assistant to Silvers, in 2009, and moved up the editorial ranks to become a senior editor.
Given the fallout over the Ghomeshi essay and the widely noted gender imbalance among the magazine’s contributors, there was speculation that a woman would succeed Buruma. In 2017, women wrote about 23 percent of the pieces published in the Review, according to nonprofit organization VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Greenhouse (whose father, Steven Greenhouse, was a longtime reporter for The New York Times) said that addressing the reality reflected in the VIDA count will be part of her mission.
“I consider that a great priority, and that’s been a focus for me as a young woman,” she said. “I think it’s extremely important not only for the counts, but to represent the world more fully and more exactly.”
But Emily Greenhouse also emphasized that this was “no wrecking ball moment,” and that she envisioned the job as “a combination of stewardship and continuity and reinvigorating something.”
Hederman said he began the search for Buruma’s replacement intent on naming two editors, rather than one, but with no set idea about gender. “It could have ended up with two women; it could have been two men,” he said. “We ended up with the best candidates.”
Silvers and Epstein founded and built the magazine organically, making their chemistry a difficult thing to re-create. But Greenhouse and Winslow-Yost believe that their own longtime friendship, and most importantly the time they spent working together for Silvers, will help them share power.
“Working as an assistant at the Review is a tag-in, tag-out experience, and you necessarily establish a trust,” Greenhouse said. “Gabe and I met eight years ago now, maybe longer, and we have a real trust in our relationship.” Asked to describe his relationship with Greenhouse, Winslow-Yost simply said: “We’re friends.”
In separate interviews, both editors said they don’t expect to divide the workload into separate subject areas, aside from a few exceptions.
“He knows more about physics than I do,” Greenhouse said.
“She speaks French, and I do not,” Winslow-Yost said.
“But I would consider both of us generalists,” Greenhouse said. “I think we will make decisions together.” Greenhouse, who is expecting her first child next month, said the timing of the new job is “radically shocking” for her.
“Some things will sort themselves into one half of the head or the other, as we go,” Winslow-Yost said. “But the idea is not to divide things into two camps, which is, as I understand, how Bob and Barbara did it. They had to agree on every piece that went in, even if it took weeks of hammering out.”
Hederman said that Mendelsohn, in his role, would be in the office perhaps one day a week (“maybe more, that’s up to him”), and that his longtime relationship with Silvers, the Review and many of the magazine’s contributors could only help the younger co-editors as they begin their term.
“It’s been hard,” Winslow-Yost said of the time since Silvers’ death. “The whole place was conceived around him; the way the physical space worked. All of that was based around the very idiosyncratic and not replicable way he worked. It’s taken a while to learn how to function as a magazine without him there.”
He went on to say that “one person can’t do it in the way it needs to be done,” and that the past five months without a top editor have been “an incredible period of people sharing responsibility” and a model for how things will look going forward.
Greenhouse said that some of the changes she envisions at the magazine are not radical but things that others, including The New Yorker, have done, like podcasts, newsletters, events and more outreach on college campuses.
A news release announcing the new editors also mentioned that the first prizes of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation will be awarded at the end of 2019. These prizes — ranging in value from $15,000 to $30,000 — are designed to support writers working on “in-depth political, social, economic and scientific commentary, long-form arts and literary criticism and the intellectual essay.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.