The List Read Free

Getty and say a stern hello to hard-hitting news, I put out some feelers.
    At the end of July, when New York was in its summer slowdown, I started reaching out
     to my Washington contacts and was told that the place to be was the Capitolist . Both the fast-moving website and the daily print publication were dominating the
     Hill, an editor friend at the Washington Post told me. As soon as her contract ended, she was applying there and I should, too.
     I asked her for her Capitolist contact, sent my résumé to the hiring manager for a Style reporter position, and
     a month of interviews and writing tests later, I had an offer.
    The Capitolist . I considered it for about a nanosecond, and then I said yes.
    “You’ve gone insane,” said my boss at Town & Country magazine in New York when I gave notice in September. “Do you know what happens to
     people who work at the Capitolist ? Immediate varicose veins. All over. Even in your face. You’ll gain ten to fifteen
     pounds, your hair will dull, your teeth will yellow, you’ll forget all foreign languages,
     and you’ll start eating entire cakes for breakfast.”
    “Entire cakes?” I asked.
    “Yes, entire cakes,” he said.
    He sighed and looked at me as if I had just declared that I was donating all my working
     limbs to science. “But yes,” he conceded, “you will know a hell of a lot about politics
     and those ugly, sad people who call themselves leaders.” He walked right up to me,
     gave me a kiss on each cheek, and said, “If that’s what you want, go on.” He took
     my official, typed two-weeks notice and told human resources to open the job I had
     worked so hard to get.
    After deciding to trade in Manhattan’s money and eccentricity for Washington’s power
     and traditions, I called my only childhood friend who had stayed home rather than
     running north. Twenty years ago, we had eaten live starfish together while on a church
     group vacation and had ended the jaunt as two very ill best friends. She was working
     at the single cool art gallery in D.C. and had taken to wearing origami shapes instead
     of clothing with archaic things like sleeves.
    Elsa’s take on the offer was that if I said anything but yes, I was as good as lobotomized.
     Forget that it paid Starbucks wages. “You got a job at the Capitolist ? That’s huge!” she shouted into her iPhone. “Everyone wants to work there. Seriously.
     People have been leaving the Washington Post in droves to work there. I read an article that said as much in the New York Times . Of course they’re probably biased, but whatever. It’s the place to be right now.
     It wins awards daily. It’s filled with geniuses. People are obsessed.” In the back
     I could hear a strange harmonica sound mixed with the clanging of dishes.
    Elsa yelled at her interns to keep it down. “By the way, did I tell you I was pregnant?
     Not actually pregnant, but metaphorically so. It’s all part of this performance art
     piece we’re putting on next weekend. Will you be down here by then? We could use another
     metaphorically pregnant person. Plus, you have to take that job.”
    “Eh, no. Next week, no. No time to be metaphorically pregnant until October,” I replied.
     Forget performance art; I was still a touch skeptical about the job. I liked to get
     my politics the old-fashioned way: from long-form articles, public radio, or drunks
     at cocktail parties. I wasn’t totally sold on taking over Capitol Hill one tweetable
     sentence at a time. But Elsa was right about the Capitolist ’s reputation. The paper had its wonky tentacles stretched all over the country.
    “Who are the obsessive people who read the Capitolist ?” I asked. “Do you know any of them? Or are they all incarcerated? Because I had
     a gig in college that required a pair of latex gloves and tweezers to read the packets
     of mail delivered from the penitentiary.”
    This was actually true. My first job in journalism was at a religious