Paul Brady

How to spend exactly one day in Dubai

Raw news is immensely valuable—you can watch shares worth billions of dollars change hands when it’s disclosed—but the period of time when this is really news is ever shorter. With facts so rapidly established, journalists whose core responsibility used to be saying what happened now have to answer questions like why and what’s next. It also gives even greater value to people who can uncover news that computers cannot reach—the fact that two companies are in takeover talks or the corruption of a politician. In a world where the facts are known, commentary will become ever more important.

Gone are the days of tirelessly mining trending news and quickly reacting to any given day’s viral Facebook sensation. “Lots of different publications have CrowdTangle; everybody jumps on the same story at the same time, and you end up seeing different versions of the same article across ten different websites,” Kylstra says. “And it gets traffic.” Instead, Self acknowledged that they frankly weren’t equipped to function as a breaking news organization, instead focusing on the ways the brand could cover its key topic areas—fitness, health, nutrition, beauty, culture—in a way that was unique, service-oriented, and science-based. “We realized that traffic just for the sake of traffic wasn’t doing us any favors,” she continues. “We aren’t writing about celebrity haircuts anymore. Even though you can argue that those stories are about beauty and self expression, there just wasn’t a way for us to do them in a way that made it clearly a Self story.”

There’s a lot of reading to be done. It’s very hard to read in the office, and that means reading pieces that are actually going to go in the magazine or online, but also pieces that aren’t, that people send in and deserve an answer. Or reading galleys of books that may find their way into The New Yorker in some ways. And the reading never stops. ... ... There’s no end to it.

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I like to think that Vogue is the centre of excellence in whatever it is that we embark on. Some succeed and some fail. We can’t be everything to everybody. I think we have to remain incredibly focused on what being in Vogue or part of Vogue is ... That’s what I talk to all our contributors and all our editors, all our photographers, writers whatever it may be about, that we need to respect that because fashion is available now to everybody, on a very mass level, and I think to some extent, to some degree, that’s become a bit of a problem. There’s just so much out there. I look on it as Vogue’s job to curate what we see ... changes in culture, changes in political times, changes in fashion. It’s our job to make sense of that to our audiences whether it’s through the book I wanted you to look at or whether it’s through our Instagram feed, whatever it may be. We are always curating, we are always editing, we are always trying to focus and maintain our standards. I ask everyone who works here, I encourage everyone who works here, to be very open. I think it’s when you close yourself off, and don’t welcome change and disruption, that’s a huge mistake.

An easily overlooked aspect of Voltaire’s thought was the priority it gave, especially in his later life, to practice. Watchmaking, vegetable growing, star charting: the great Enlightenment thinker turned decisively away from abstraction as he aged. The argument of “Candide” is neither that the world gets better nor that it’s all for naught; it’s that happiness is where you find it, and you find it first by making it yourself. The famous injunction to “cultivate our garden” means just that: make something happen, often with your hands. It remains, as it was meant to, a reproach to all ham-fisted intellects and deskbound brooders. Getting out to make good things happen beats sitting down and thinking big things up. The wind blows every which way in the world, and Voltaire’s last word to the windblown remains the right one. There are a lot of babies yet to comfort, and gardens still to grow.

Competent lawyers might tell you that your Muslim ban is unconstitutional; competent scientists that climate change is real; competent economists that tax cuts don’t pay for themselves; competent voting experts that there weren’t millions of illegal ballots; competent diplomats that the Iran deal makes sense, and Putin is not your friend. So competence must be excluded.

"This is vastly different from Westphalia and the Baron's castle. Had our friend Pangloss seen El Dorado he would no longer have said that the castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh was the finest upon earth. It is evident that one must travel."

"But, Mr. Martin, have you seen Paris?" "Yes, I have. All these kinds are found there. It is a chaos—a confused multitude, where everybody seeks pleasure and scarcely any one finds it, at least as it appeared to me. I made a short stay there. On my arrival I was robbed of all I had by pickpockets at the fair of St. Germain. I myself was taken for a robber and was imprisoned for eight days, after which I served as corrector of the press to gain the money necessary for my return to Holland on foot. I knew the whole scribbling rabble, the party rabble, the fanatic rabble. It is said that there are very polite people in that city, and I wish to believe it."

This is a time we are compelled to fight for free expression and a free press—rights granted us under the Constitution, yes, but also the very qualities that have long set us apart from other nations. We will have a new president soon. He was elected after waging an outright assault on the press. Animosity toward the media was a centerpiece of his campaign. He described the press as “disgusting,” “scum,” “lowlifes.” He called journalists the “lowest form of humanity.” That apparently wasn’t enough. So he called us “the lowest form of life.” In the final weeks of the campaign he labeled us “the enemies.”

His fascination with the refugee crisis began in 2015, when the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Culture in Iraq commissioned him to curate an exhibition of some 500 artworks from an Iraqi refugee camp for the Venice Biennale, Traces of Survival. (It has since been released as a book.) But his interest in the crisis has shifted into high gear since the return of his passport. He visited refugee centers in Berlin and on Lesbos, the entry point into Europe for tens of thousands of asylum seekers. He was profoundly affected by seeing boatloads full of refugees landing on the beaches there. “I really didn’t expect to see it in front of me,” he says. “It was shocking.” Seeing the human face of the crisis and its overwhelming scale inspired him to make a documentary, which has sent him on almost constant international travel—to the Idomeni refugee camp, where some 14,000 people were trapped on the closed border between Greece and Macedonia; to the Lebanese camp Ain al-Hilweh, which was established in 1948 and currently shelters around 100,000 refugees; to Jordan, Turkey, Kenya and Bangladesh. “I have to first observe and learn,” he says. “The visits help adjust my own views on the global political situation. I hope what has touched me can also impact others.”