Megan Greenwell

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

megan dot greenwell at gmail dotcom

Recent Tweets @megreenwell

I made this. Not by myself, in case that was remotely unclear, but it was my job to conceive the Taboo issue, come up with a story lineup, and make it happen with two wonderful colleagues. And now it’s happened!

I started working on this issue in late January. It wasn’t the first issue of ESPN the Magazine that I’ve produced (the second!), but it was way more complicated than my first. There were moments I thought it wouldn’t happen. There was the moment the EIC suggested killing it. There was the moment Jason Collins came out, radically changing the discussion of sports taboos four short weeks before our close date. There was the moment our fourth cover possibility had fallen through and nobody had any idea what we were going to do for the cover. In between, there was a case of strep throat that kept me out of the office for three days, and a day I thought we were all going to get laid off.

Creating this issue was the toughest project of my career, and it drove home one major life lesson: Always take a job you’re underqualified for. This is not a unique revelation; I’ve received this advice from trusted mentors several times myself. I followed it in taking this job (one of my now-bosses told me explicitly in my interview that I was underqualified, in fact). Yet I know plenty of brilliant people who have taken jobs that aren’t good enough for them—even though they have better offers!—because they’re scared to get in over their heads.

But feeling in over your head is a good thing! Sure, it’s scary as hell. It causes stress and caffeine addiction and sleepless nights and is undoubtedly a contributing factor to strep throat. But the moment you proof the last page of an issue you doubted your ability to create, it’s pretty fucking worth it.

Now I’m going on the hardest-earned vacation of my career.

I do not have the right personality to become a secretary in 1959.

Biggest LOLs at #5, 6, 7, 12

(via Slate)

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

I’m rereading Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead for approximately the 74th time and marveling all over again.

Motto via Mad Men/Chris Piascik

mad men

(via @nybooks)

joan didion

New Girl forever and ever amen.

via Ann, with this note: “here is a thing for you to send to writers when they are being stubborn or when you are hungover”

journalism

For ESPN the Magazine’s 15th anniversary, I edited the cover photo feature starring six athletes who will still matter 15 years from now.

(l-r: Blake Griffin, Ronda Rousey, Robert Griffin III, Bryce Harper. Also featured: Chris Kluwe, Nyjah Huston)

But whereas being a female reporter was once synonymous with tenacity, superior intellect, and wit, today’s fictional female reporter serves as shorthand for new media reporter/blogger: young, naïve, and morally bankrupt.

Hollywood’s utter failure to accurately portray female journalists - The Week (via npr)

(via annfriedman)

It is a Medieval bullying stick the bishops used to keep control over people and to keep the voices of women silent. I am way beyond letting octogenarian men tell us how to live our lives.

Rosemarie Smead, age 70, on the threat of excommunication from the Catholic church after a dissident group ordained her a priest.