Twenty years ago today at the Waldorf Astoria, a very
strange thing happened to a young magazine and a young man. The
"thing" was winning the National Magazine Award for General
Excellence. The young magazine was American Health. The young man was me. An
obstreperous entrepreneur invited to be an insider.
I hope I don't sound ungrateful when I say, in retrospect,
that this nod of recognition had a less than salutary effect on the enterprise.
It made all sorts of things too easy for the magazine—and for me. It made
editors feel comfortable repealing themselves when what was needed was
something as fresh as what had won the award in the first place.
To this day I harbor a—perhaps unreasonable—bias that
clique-ish insider recognition is, invariably, a jinx. It brings all the wrong
people to the table. Beware that knowing wink, that backslapping nod, the
unspoken assumptions, the champagne welcome to any club, especially if that
club has devised its own rule of exclusivity and definition of what is excellent.
Beware of gatekeepers, censors, and societies of
excluders—especially when they let you in.
InsideOut magazine. I had been struck by what it had already
achieved. One winter day I was introduced to meet founders Hilary Kramer and LK
Kavars. They encouraged me to get involved.
Our first act? To take the Inside (in the logo) Out. Because
for this magazine, what's inside is the Hudson River Valley. It's the place.
It's the most beautiful 3-D canvas in the world. Our new offices (see below)
are directly in the view-shed of Frederick Church's home Olana.
What's inside: the ongoing story of the people who make
these communities work. The day-to-day is sometimes unexciting, and
occasionally dreary. The people that make things happen are not. They're
heroes. Our team began the navigation at Hudson. Then we went clown the river
to Kingston, then up the river to Albany. Our process was a little more
eclectic than that, but it was, also, that simple. As the peregrine falcon
flies along the river, so do we, with our airborne editors. The inside for us
will always be close to the ebbs and flows of the river.
The new inside is comprehensive in scope and moves from the
intimate—what we eat, drink, and connect to—to the in-the-world business of who
we are: our houses, our money, our shrubs. Follow meticulously obsessive Brigit
Binns as she tracks the perfect cup of tea... let Peter Landolt tell you what
wine is....listen as Paula Forman talks about the anthropology of culling
things out of a garden...let Nicole Roskos tell you about a Hudson Valley coop
that is obsessed with making a difference. Listen to Elaine Pagels who gets
very inside news on the guy with the world's worst press: Judas... the sheer
exuberance of being roller derby girls...the new scoop from an eminent sex
therapist on why relationships seem to run out of passion (in about the same
amount of time as the Kennedy administration stayed in office... old houses
made new, but kept old, and about the state of world according to Paul Hawken.
And of course, then, there's Albany.
So: What's in? Diversity. The Hudson River Valley. Community
Stuff. The gay, the straight, the undecided. Drag queens, environmentalists,
artists and small-city mayors. Who's out? Bigots of every stripe. The censors,
the excluders, the generalizers, the unkind, the uncurious, the uninvolved. The
people who claim to speak for others. And all of the people that can't—or
won't—contemplate a better way.
