We Need Editors, Not Algorithms
gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss? good.
I. The Devil and the Deep Cerulean Sea
It was an algorithm, not an editor, that led me down the rabbit hole that ultimately resulted in my rejecting algorithms in favor of editors, the TikTok algorithm specifically, but I’d like to think such ironies are God’s sense of humor. My TikTok use is rare; it consists mostly of—once a month, when I remember the app exists—flicking yearningly through footage of golden-hour mountains and lakes, bookmarking makeup tutorials I’ll never revisit and don’t have the products for anyway, and living vicariously through fellow 20-something-year-old women, usually in New York, who light candles in clean, minimalistic apartments or rearrange the expensive, beautiful perfume bottles on their perfect vanities. This time it brought me clips of the filming of The Devil Wears Prada 2, which I watched at first reluctantly, then fervently, until I cracked and coerced my husband into rewatching the original 2006 The Devil Wears Prada with me late, too late into the night.
The Devil Wears Prada is about a young woman in New York City—Andrea “Andy” Sachs (played by Anne Hathaway)—who has just graduated from college. Wide-eyed and wet behind the ears, she arrives woefully unprepared and tragically unstylish into the clean glass glamor of Runway magazine (a thinly veiled fictionalization of Vogue), where assistants and stylists and art directors and editors and indeed a veritable small army of fashion underlings are running to and fro, slipping off flats and sliding into high heels, retouching their lipstick in the desktop Mac’s Photo Booth, wheeling away racks of designer garb, laying out a glossy swathe of magazines, filling a glass with Pellegrino water, detecting onion bagels on breath.
What is all this flurry and flummox, all this rustle and rush for—or rather, who? The answer is Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), for whom car doors open and the golden gates of the Elias Clarke office building swing wide, for whom young women step out of elevators they were in first, apologizing, deferent, for whom loins are girded, chaos is cleared, and panic induced, for whom the silken gears and the beaded cogs of fashion grind and churn. Ding! The elevator doors open. There she is, the magisterial sweep of her white hair coiffed to perfection, her hands gloved in leather, her form clad in black, the mockup of Runway’s next issue tucked beneath her arm. With an imperial toss of her head, she takes off those unforgettable Gucci sunglasses, and we at last come face-to-face with the commander of the whole operation, the captain of the ship, the general of the army, Runway’s editor-in-chief.
This is a woman who would have ruled empires and masterminded the razing of cities in days of old. In the no less cruel but perhaps more polished realm of corporate America she is content to rule a fiefdom of New York’s glossiest and raze lumpy cerulean sweaters, worn by aspiring journalists with enough hubris to think themselves exempt from something so silly, so frivolous, so trivial and superficial as outer beauty. The last two assistants were dismal; with a queenly wave of the hand and one of those soft, deadly “that’s all”s, she dismisses Emily, the first assistant, who was supposed to be interviewing Andy, and interviews her herself. Within two minutes Andy is scrutinized, sized up, appraised and picked apart, all while Miranda multitasks, her attention seemingly half there. In spite of Andy’s abysmal ignorance of Miranda, Runway, and names like de la Renta and Demarchelier, she gets the job. Then commences her torture.
Over the next hour or so of runtime, Miranda will put her through a series of increasingly draconian tasks, Herculean labors that require her to make frantic calls and miss birthdays and scamper around Manhattan carrying impossible amounts of shopping bags and implode her ego and her personal life. She cries; she considers quitting.
In the book, Miranda is clearly a villain; her sole purpose seems to be to torture our protagonist. In the movie, that’s not quite the picture we get. Is Miranda demanding, critical, haughty, cold, elitist, backstabbing? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And yet it’s not for the demands of her ego that she sends everyone around her into a tizzy, that she shoots down ideas in meetings, that she purses her lips in displeasure at a designer’s fashion show, that her main mood—emotionally, grammatically—is the imperative. It’s because she’s doing her job.
And it’s because she’s good at her job. Take the famous “cerulean” speech. God, I love that speech. I get so stoked when Andy snorts and everyone’s heads swivel towards her and Miranda asks her if something’s funny and we know she’s really in for it now and we are going to see the master—Meryl the actor, Miranda the editor—at work. In my head I am rubbing my palms together in glee.
Miranda can prise apart a color—“blue”—into its precise shades: “turquoise,” “lapis,” “cerulean.” Miranda can recollect the whole sartorial history of a hue, tracing its lineage back to its first appearance on the runway (2002, Oscar de la Renta). Miranda can point out exact items of clothing the color used as its canvas (military jackets, Yves Saint Laurent). Everything off the top of her head, no notes, no smartphones to look things up. And all this while she’s working. It’s true: the two turquoise belts she’s choosing between—the impetus for Andy’s snorting in laugher—are not the same at all. One has a round, sparse, slender buckle; the other has a chunky, squarish, glittery buckle. Our untrained eye may see little difference. Miranda’s trained eye sees all the difference. The devil, it turns out, is in the details.
II. Kill the Gatekeeper
The years between 2006 and 2025 saw a shrinking of the editor role. Needless to say, that went hand-in-hand with the decline of traditional newspapers and magazines. Read about the magazine heyday of the 1970s or even the “halcyon era”1 of the 1990s and early 2000s and a young writer (I don’t exclude myself) can start to foam a little at the mouth for envy: the greater number of full-time opportunities, the salaries, the expense accounts, the perks, the loftier stature of the writer in society, the large readership, the general glamor and the gloss of it all. In these institutions it was the editors, not the writers (or the illustrators or the photographers or the fact-checkers), who ruled the roost.
Before social media and the Internet, if you were an artist—a writer, a filmmaker, a musician—and you wanted to get your work out there, you had to go through any number of gatekeepers. As an artist, it’s easy to hate these people, who seem to be put on the planet solely to torture you and make you want to pitch yourself not to them but out of the nearest window, so damaging is it to nervously, hopefully, willingly expose yourself to rejection over and over and over again. The gatekeepers kept out the marginalized; they shored up the privileged. They followed the imperatives of large corporations; their tastes were stultified, boring, biased, ossified, unable to admit anything fresh or experimental. They were too few people barring the gates of paradise to too many. They were mean. They killed your darlings and seriously injured your slightly less beloveds.
For Silicon Valley, the solution was simple: kill the gatekeepers. Then snobbiness would be exchanged for democracy, restriction for freedom, closed doors for open. Anyone could create, anyone could publish, anyone could get their work, their art, their soul “out there,” anyone could find their audience, cultivate their 1000 superfans, make money doing what they loved. It was a brave new world, and you only had to be enterprising enough to snatch it.
Excuse me for saying this, but there is a lot of crap on the Internet. There is a lot of crap on social media, and there is a lot of crap on Substack. There is a lot of good stuff, too, but you often have to filter through a lot of crap to get to it. Often the same sorts of work—now we call it “content”—emerge, are pushed out in front of our eyeballs. Who—or rather, what—are the pushers? The answer is algorithms, which on social media have functionally replaced editors.
Here, more often than not, is my experience on Substack: I see a post with an interesting headline, the sort of thing I know I’d be interested in reading. I read, and I am disappointed. The post usually ends earlier than I would have liked it to, is shorter than I expected. It seems to have been gathering steam, some philosopher, some theory, some academic monograph is invoked, I think it is really going somewhere this time, and then the argument collapses into a dustheap of clichés and banalities. A lot of the writing sounds the same, too, stylistically and tonally; a lot of the topics are the same. Lists after lists after lists of book recommendations—often the recommendations overlap. Aesthetically, too, things seem to converge. There are the pink girly Substacks with their ribbons or swans or love letters, there are the minimalistic cool girl sorts, there is the profusion of all-lowercase, which seems to have infected every level of Substack and even writers I respect.2
So what we have is that instead of writing for editors, writers write for algorithms. According to research from MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, human editors seem to have the advantage when it comes to stories like breaking news, where algorithms have a limited amount of data to work with, in figuring out what readers are likely to click on and read.3 After about 10 clicks, the algorithm pulls ahead in predicting reader behavior. The algorithm builds on that data, continuing to push more and more content towards you that is similar to content you’ve clicked on, read, and interacted with in the past. But the Algorithmic Cocoon, first a comfortable swaddle, can choke the life out of you.
An editor, obviously, is a human being (resemblances to Satan aside) with whom a writer can interact with, have a conversation with, go back and forth with. An editor has a personality, a sensibility. An editor can tell you about the affect of your piece, an editor can push you to think harder, think deeper, think more. An editor can call you out when you have a badly constructed sentence or a lazy paragraph, an editor can eliminate tired expressions with the stroke of a red pen, an editor can cut the crap.
At a higher level, an editor is someone like Miranda: someone with a mission and a vision. “They all act like they’re curing cancer or something,” Andy complains early on about her colleagues. The inference she wants us to make is that fashion is trivial, curing cancer important. Yet one gets the sense from Miranda that she does view her job from the same life-and-death angle most people would view “curing cancer.” Somehow it is vital to her, existential. And getting it right is almost a life-and-death matter.
A writer may or may not be a perfectionist as the chips fall. But it is the editor’s job to be a perfectionist. Miranda doesn’t reject everything wholesale, just because she wants to, just because she’s having a bad day, just because someone didn’t get her her coffee on time, just because she woke up on the wrong side of the bed. She has a working archive in her brain of past issues; she can’t brook lazy repeats. Things done two years ago are unacceptable. Ideas have to be original, sparkling, new. Pieces that don’t work with the issue are cut; pieces that don’t meet the mark demand rewriting: “I need to see a new draft on that piece about shopping for a plastic surgeon, it’s dull.” A “Winter Wonderland” spread is “not wonderful yet,” with the implication that it better be, pronto. When Nigel (Stanley Tucci) proffers the one idea in the editorial meeting that fits her exacting vision, she smiles and calls it (what else?), “Per-fect.”
I’m not going to argue for legacy media over platforms like Substack; that’s not what this essay is about. Substack has given me a way to get my work out into the world, an audience I feel proud of having grown myself, a writing routine, crucial practice on a regular basis, fodder for the intellect and the imagination, a community whose worth is invaluable. But I am skeptical about the exchange of non-human algorithms for human editors. The editor says, witheringly, “Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking,” but the algorithm says, blithely, “Essay on yearning? Here’s 1,000 more!”
There are tastemakers on Substack; in fact, many popular newsletters are aggregators, filters of articles and art and media found elsewhere, curators. But the sheer numbers bewilder. They pile on top of each other, one after another; the mind boggles. Now we need someone to filter the filterers, aggregate the aggregators. Who’s going to curate the curators?
Magazines and journals, like The Metropolitan Review or The Republic of Letters, with their own editorial staff, exist on Substack, too. But they are only a very small piece of the pie. Not only that, but they’re subject to the same algorithmic and aesthetic constraints everyone else is subject to. Even if you wanted to run a magazine on Substack, you wouldn’t be able to impose your vision the way Miranda does on Runway because the algorithm would always and ever be your editor-in-chief.
This is a fact that our tech overlords like to keep hidden in the shadows. Tech CEOs emphatically disavow their platforms as publishers and themselves as editors. That explains the laissez-faire approach: AI goes, plagiarism goes, Nazis go, anything goes, I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, they go. This they defend on the basis of “free speech.” When Elon Musk took over Twitter and turned it into X, he declared it needed to “fulfill its potential as ‘the platform for free speech around the world.’”4 Lover of free speech though I am, I retain my doubts. “No verse is free,” wrote T. S. Eliot, “for the man who wants to do a good job.” And for the writer who wants to do a good job, no speech is free. Refusal to filter is also an editorial decision, just the laziest.
Increasingly on Substack, I’ve come across obviously AI-generated posts—soulless, trite, dull, sometimes senseless—that, optimized by AI for the engagement optimizer that is the algorithm, have thousands upon thousands of likes. These likes mean they get pushed to more readers, which means they get more likes, which means they get pushed to even more readers, and so on and on. The logic goes that for the writer who wants to be successful (“successful”), it is necessary to write about these topics, shape your prose into this style, follow these aesthetic conventions, so as to catch an algorithmic wave. A writer who optimizes to appeal to an editor, a good editor, optimizes for quality. But a writer who writes to appeal to an algorithm optimizes for, well, crap, more often than not.
True, magazines are subject to the same market demands as social media. They’re art gone corporate. And yet they still retain something of art. “What they did, what they created was greater than art because you live your life in it,” Nigel tells Andy of the fashion greats who’ve graced Runway’s halls. The same might be said of magazines themselves. At their best, magazines are helmed by the best editors: sharp, exacting, precise, with discerning enough judgment to be closed to what’s bad, even if it’s popular or conventional, and open to what’s good, even if it’s strange and unfamiliar. Like a laser beam, the editorial eye is able to look past the lumpy sweater and the schoolgirl skirt and the woeful unpreparedness and see something that no one else can. Lasers transmit data through communication networks; they are used in eye surgery to mend vision; they are also excellent cutting tools.
Trial by rejection is an important part of every young writer’s development. There is rejection on Substack, too, but it is rejection by numbers: not having X number of likes on a post, not having X number of subscribers. Is that the kind of rejection that pushes you to become a better writer? In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy fails and fails again. Her boss is cryptic and terse; there’s not much in the way of helpful feedback. And yet by the end of the film she’s better at her job; she’s learned a lot, grown a lot, changed a lot, and when you see her in the offices of The New York Mirror, interviewing for another job, there is, after all, something different about her. She’s more mature, more confident in herself. She seems prepared, put together. And she hasn’t become this way by herself. It’s because somebody—a real human person, with all the strength and vigor and passion and force of personality that that entails—pushed her to be. Tough love is tough, yes, but it is also love. A machine, we all know, is incapable of love.
III. Ex Materia
Before the Big Bang was theorized, there were two theories of how the world was created. The Biblical theory is creatio ex nihilo, creation from nothing. God woke up and just decided to create the universe one day; before that, nothing was. The Ancient Greek theory is creatio ex materia, creation from pre-existing matter, usually Chaos. Ovid describes creation from chaos in the Metamorphoses. First the universe was a “rude and undigested mass,” and all the “seeds of things” were “discordant, not well-joined together.” Land and sea and sky were jumbled up into a heap, the land unwalkable, the sea unsailable. Then “deus et melior… natura” came along, “God and a better nature,” and cleaved the sky from the land and the land from the waves and shaped and carved and guided and molded.
Because of this, the water sloughed off into usable rivers and streams. The sky was able to take stars into her bosom; the land could be carpeted with green. From the rude “seeds of things,” life itself could take root, grow and flourish. Ovid calls this god fabricator, “builder, maker, artificer.” This god, too, is an artist, just as much as the one who creates from nothing, who braves the blank page and its infinite white miles and puts the first tentative mark there.
Right now it is a beautiful summer day. The sun brings out an almost aching greenness from the leaves, a pure, almost holy blue (is it cerulean?) from the sky. From the window, I can see my husband deadheading roses in the back garden. The withered blooms fall off one by one, leaving the green stems headless, rather sad and ugly things. But I know because of this pruning new roses will come, larger roses, taller, healthier, more vibrant, more abundant, more lovely. They will flourish into beauty.
Editing is important. It involves that rarest of things, good judgment. Something that has to be honed and trained and refined, something that isn’t backwards-looking and reactive but forward-looking and active, something that cuts not out of malice but only because it sees the shape of the stencil.
Growing up is a process of editing. We delete bad habits, thoughts, urges, environments, jobs, lovers, friends. This can be emotionally difficult. Yet we do it because we see something better on the other side, because we have a vision, because we want to grow, because sometimes you have to burn away the infected tissue in order to allow the healthy to heal.
At the end of The Devil Wears Prada, Andy and Nigel toast Nigel’s anticipated promotion to creative director of a new brand with the rising star of the fashion world, designer James Holt. After 18 years, Nigel says, he’ll finally have some kind of freedom. Later, Andy hears word that behind the scenes, Elias Clarke is devising to replace Miranda at Runway with a new editor-in-chief, someone younger, ostensibly more “hip,” a certain Jacqueline Follet, Miranda’s rival and the editor-in-chief of French Runway. She takes off in a panic to tell Miranda, but it turns out Miranda, always one step ahead, already knows. In a stunning (for Nigel, for Andy) betrayal, Miranda has Jacqueline given the position with James Holt, keeping Nigel at Runway and, most importantly, herself at Runway. “The truth is,” she tells Andy in the car, “there is no one that can do what I do, including her. Any of the other choices would have found that job impossible, and the magazine would have suffered.”
From someone else’s mouth, these words might have sounded arrogant, egotistical, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing. But we believe Miranda. We understand her choice, even if we reel from it. It’s a calculated risk, the calculation being that Nigel is too nice to stab her back, that feelings can change, that sometimes they have to be flattened for the sake of a vision, a mission. But this is a choice Andy can’t condone. It’s a cold calculus, the human becoming algorithmic. Miranda points out the similarities between herself and Andy; like herself, she tells Andy, “You can see beyond what people want and people need and you can choose for yourself.”
So Andy chooses for herself, too. She chooses not to follow Miranda. She chooses to walk away—from the job, from the designer clothes, from Paris, from Miranda. She chooses to drop her cell phone, ever ringing with calls from Miranda, into a fountain, and walk away smiling. These are not career choices, not aesthetic choices, not even selfish choices. They are the highest of all kinds of choices: they are moral choices. We, too, can choose the human over the algorithmic, the compassionate over the calculating, the forward- over the backward-looking, the warm over the cold. Today we can drop the phone in the fountain not because the editor is calling but because it’s an algorithm that’s culling. What is editing, after all, but making choices?
Further Reading:
On the subject of magazines, particularly within the Condé Nast stable, Henry Begler has written a number of illuminating essays here, here, and here.
becca rothfeld does make an argument for legacy media > Substack here
In the wake of the plagiarism scandal, I enjoyed reading the following, which got my noggin joggin’ for some of the issues related to this essay: Valerie on women, ambition, and moral integrity; briffin glue on “the voice of Substack,” LLMs, and “the Echoborg”; and Clare’s “I respect grift and I respect stupidity”
For The New Yorker’s 100th anniversary, Jill Lepore writes about the editorial battles behind the scenes at the storied magazine, the important and often invisible role of its editors
I’ve been really enjoying reading The Editor Function: Literary Publishing in Postwar America by Abram Foley, which traces the development and history of the editor role post-WWII
Bryan Burroughs, “Vanity Fair’s Heyday.”
I’ve been guilty of this too occasionally, and I think when it comes to headlines it DOES look nice.
Jörg Claussen, Christian Peukert, and Ananya Sen, “The Editor vs. the Algorithm: Targeting, Data and Externalities in Online News,” 2019.
you write so beautifully and chock full of truth omg thank you for putting your work out
my wife & i have watched that movie many times, & yet i still prefer andi’s look before her makeover