“What’s powering this moment is that the uniqueness of it, the speed, the intensity of it, is actually matching the crisis and the possibility at hand,” she said.
“I want to get the story right, you know? This is a crucial historic moment, and it’s very easy to get paralyzed by that.”
Traister has become known for her writing on women and power (or lack thereof). In 2018, she won a National Magazine Award for her New York columns about the Me Too movement, including one headlined, “This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex. It’s Really About Work.”
In one of our first conversations last year, she described her beat as “power.”
“Who has it? Who wants it? Who’s doing what to get it? Who’s trying to defend it? Who’s trying to preserve it?” she said. “The answers to those questions are very often going to fall on gendered and racial lines, and certainly economic.”
Credit: Joe McKendry for New York Magazine
Traister began her journalism career in the early 2000s, as an editorial assistant at the Harvey Weinstein-funded Talk magazine, then as a fact-checker and reporter at the New York Observer. (In 2017, when reporting on Weinstein’s pattern of sexual assault and manipulation first emerged, she wrote that Weinstein berated her and physically assaulted her colleague when they sought to ask him a question at a party. It was when she worked at the Observer; unrelated to her time at Talk.) Though she didn’t jump to the “power” beat right away, she did pivot pretty immediately to media commentary and feminism—even though the latter was “wildly out of fashion” at the time. (For example, during the peak of body-shaming celebrity tabloid culture, she wrote about Jennifer Aniston in “The not-good-enough girl” in 2005, critiquing the obsessive, cruel coverage of her in the aftermath of her break up with Brad Pitt.)
She stayed at Salon before joining The New Republic; today, she’s also a contributing editor at Elle and is working on her fourth book, which she can’t totally discuss but she says is “not about electoral politics.”
(She has also occasionally dipped a toe into the more absurd sides of the internet conversation, like in one 2015 piece about Animal, the Muppet, in which she pleaded with readers: “Please stop talking about fucking Muppets. I don’t mean ‘fucking’ as an adjective.”)
In 2006, Salon assigned Traister to write about Hillary Clinton, as she geared up to run for president in the 2008 election.
“I came in despising her politics, actually, and became completely fascinated in my years of writing about her about how resistant people were to depictions of her as fully human,” Traister said. “She’s actually a human being who has shaped and lived through just an incredible period of American history.”
Her coverage of other extremely powerful women politicians was just as notable, particularly her profiles. In 2020, she wrote about Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a once-upon-a-time moderate who defended Brett Kavanaugh on the Senate floor in 2018, both painting him as the innocent victim of a smear campaign and claiming that he wouldn’t vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. (He wasn’t, and he did.) In June 2022, Traister also wrote a long piece cataloging the career of then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who was, at the time, clinging onto her powerful Senate seat despite widely substantiated claims that she had dementia. Feinstein was still the senior senator from California when she died in September 2023.
Though her own politics also have informed some of this coverage, Traister is clear about what those opinions may be. “I lodged those complaints responsibly and reported them,” she told me. The playbook for writing about Collins and Feinstein was similar to covering Clinton, with Traister seeking to remind readers that they are, indeed, human, while also being very direct “about deploring the role they played in American politics.”
Last month, Traister’s piece headlined “The Joyous Plot to Elect Kamala Harris” appeared on the cover of New York. The piece retraced the grassroots efforts to bolster Harris’s campaign, starting with Jotaka Eaddy, who organized the now-famous Zoom call of tens of thousands of Black women who were immediately activated to organize and fundraise for Harris. (Similar identity and affinity group calls sprouted up shortly thereafter, from Black men for Harris to Swifties for Harris.)
“No one imagined airplane hangars crammed to the rafters with chanting people or that anyone would associate the concept of ‘joy’ with a party that seemed all but ready to hand back the presidency to Donald Trump,” Traister wrote. “And this summer’s shocking turn of events was engineered not by any consultant or strategic mastermind but by committed Democrats on the ground who, perhaps realizing that few in leadership had any solid plan to save them, took matters into their own hands.”
In February, when Biden was still the presumptive nominee, Traister said she’d occasionally grown frustrated. While she was writing a piece about abortion and Democratic politics, she realized she’d made the same argument “20 times before.” It was still, of course, necessary to make these points: “Part of the work is telling stories that remain true,” she noted. “The fact that I’m called on to do it tells me that obviously there’s still work to be done.”
But, she added, “I will say that there is a personal impulse to [say] but I kind of want to challenge myself. I want to do something different. I want to do something new.”
Polls remain tight between Harris and Trump, but at least when it comes to covering women and power, there may finally be something new in a few weeks.
Nandika Chatterjee is currently completing a master’s in journalism at New York University.
