You learn different things at different stages of life, but the Observer, the onetime house paper of New York City’s power elite, is where I learned to develop a voice. The Observer’s voice was Peter Kaplan’s—the beloved editor who ran the magazine for years before I started in 2004 and after I left in 2006—and it was his completely original style that we young writers tried our best to emulate. I usually failed, and it was up to the more senior editors to heavily edit those pieces and pull them in line with the paper’s sensibility. It’s through that back-and-forth that you learn how to write for yourself. I worry all the time that as journalism declines, and there are fewer places committed to that kind of editorial exchange, young writers aren’t getting to figure that out for themselves.

It was also helpful that the Observer had a reputation for being snarky, and even mean, to its subjects. I don’t like being mean, but writing with that sharpness taught me how to be critical and how to be tough—particularly when writing about the powerful. Unlike most mainstream publications, we could say almost anything we wanted, which is a very unusual experience for a young person to have. I learned how to be brave and recognized, eventually, that it was actually my job to take risks, to tell the darkest truths, and also to try—always, and all credit to Kaplan for this one—to say something new. It helped me immeasurably when I left to write about foreign affairs, which can tend toward the dull and stuffy. I spent the first years of my time in Istanbul trying to figure out how to write about Erdoğan like I would have for The New York Observer and still get published.