During my first week, while sitting in the Bronx with the family of a teenager who had suffered catastrophic burns from an apartment fire, I received a call from a 212 number. When I picked up, it was someone calling from the human resources department at Condé Nast. Confused, I told him he had the wrong number and hung up. Strange, I thought. Then the same number rang again, I excused myself from the family and picked up. “Before you hang up,” the caller exclaimed, “is this Jasper Lo?” Even stranger, I thought. “You recently applied for a job with us,” he said, “I don’t think so,” I replied. He continued, “well I’m here to negotiate your salary for the fact-checking position at The New Yorker.” I asked what Condé Nast had to do with the magazine. With some secondhand embarrassment, he explained.

I began working as a checker for The New Yorker’s website in August 2019. In many ways, the Daily News had been an easy off-ramp from the army: Both required wearing backpacks, walking all day, and a certain proximity to death. Fact-checking, somehow, felt isolating without that terrain.

Each day I built a world in the sonic landscape of source calls that vanished just as quickly with the churn of the web. In my first month, I was assigned to check a dispatch about the democratic crisis in Hong Kong. There was a short runway for it, but it was a thrill to get a serious assignment about a city so close to my heart. Twenty-four or 48 hours with most of the work at night? No problem, I thought. I had learned how to tackle this kind of work in the army. It was finally time to prove myself. I scheduled all my calls at the convenience of the sources in Hong Kong. Would it be correct to say that “Bonnie began to cry when she recalled a violent clash between protesters blocking legislators from passing the national security law?” I asked over the phone. I finished overnight, napping in between like it was a reconnaissance mission.

Shortly after I began checking, an assignment brought me to a call with the Daily News where a politics editor I had worked with picked up the phone. I said hello and told him I was calling from The New Yorker. Was it correct to say that the newsroom had moved twice? He said yes, then asked, “How is it over there?”—and after a pause, “Bet they don’t yell ‘motherfucker’ across their newsroom as much as we do.” No, I replied, it’s not really a “motherfucker” kind of place.

A decade before I started as a fact-checker, another New Yorker staffer, Dan Baum, had gone viral for his description of the workplace. He tweeted: “Nobody leaves a New Yorker job voluntarily. I was fired. And over the next few days, I’ll tell that story here.” This was when the platform still limited posts to 140 characters, but he exploited the constraint, releasing the story—tweet by tweet—until it reached 4,323 words. Describing the office environment, he wrote, “nobody at the office seems very happy. The atmosphere is vastly strained. I’d get back on the Times Square sidewalk after a visit and feel I needed to flap my arms.”

By the time I arrived, I understood what he meant. I’d often be stuck in the elevator with some of the country’s most successful writers and editors, sharing a heavy silence. “It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying,” Baum had written on Twitter. “Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it.”

The anxiety wore off the more I understood The New Yorker and especially the more I worked with those editors, the copy and photo editors, and all the others that rounded out the office. Magazine reporting, I learned, was unlike most other forms of journalism. There were no producers, no directors, no cinematographers or gaffers; it was only the writer, their editor, and their talent for turning reporting into a single narrative. (All my respect to the copyeditors who polished pieces into perfection.) Sometimes, when the story called for it, an impromptu investigative team formed. This happened often when I worked with editor David Haglund and staff writer Charles Bethea. Charles’s stories were pulpy—the kind that garnered movie options, while still getting to the heart of a serious national subject. He had been writing about how RICO was being used against Atlanta rappers long before Fani Willis brought charges against then-ex-president Trump.

In another of his investigations, “Is This the Worst Place to Be Poor and Charged with a Federal Crime?” Charles dove into why the Southern District of Georgia, was one of only two in the continental United States without federal or community defenders. The official line was that public defenders weren’t needed since a panel of private attorneys fulfilled the requirements of the Sixth Amendment: the right to be represented by a lawyer. But it seemed like an open secret that this was known to be insufficient. Real estate lawyers, for example, could not provide the robust defense needed for felony charges.

Charles discovered that a federal defenders’ office had existed briefly in the 1980s but was closed after being deemed unnecessary. Sources spoke of a rumor that the chief judge of the district had forced the office to close by making the head of the defenders’ office sign a resignation letter before the office opened, leverage to close the office if he pleased. The problem was that Charles couldn’t reach the man who had allegedly signed it, and the judge was long dead.

This is the curious thing about fact-checking. Sometimes, even after months of the reporter’s trying to get in touch with someone, the checker gets through. After a few days talking to the sources in the piece, people who surrounded this uncooperative head of office, I got a call out of the blue. It was him; he had heard the voicemail I left. It outlined everything that Charles had discovered and how the lawyer was being portrayed. The man had decided that he wanted to set the record straight. In the call, he told me that he had been a young and nervous attorney when he first met the chief judge. In the judge’s chamber, he was trying to make a good impression when the judge unexpectedly presented a resignation letter. The lawyer didn’t want to make a fuss and, though it struck him as strange, he thought it was customary to sign the document. This, in many ways, proved the overarching thesis of Charles’s piece, that local practices seemed to take precedence over federal law.

Fact-checkers weren’t there for factual accuracy alone, in a story like this one; we brought one last push of reporting that could crack the case. That year, citing Charles’s article, Senator Jon Ossoff introduced legislation to require an office of public defenders in the district. As I learned more about reporting, I was making more sense of the magazine itself.

I had never worked at an organization with a labor union before coming to The New Yorker, and had neither the familial history nor the political education to understand it. Still, when a steward asked me to support a collective action, I instinctively agreed. As a young officer in the army, I often had bad ideas called out by sergeants, through side-eyes and tuts. They would guide me toward something more practical and often empathic. By the same token, they told me when to push back on stupid orders or how to subvert them. Through them, I learned that there was a cost to making things go smoothly, or, ethically. There was almost always a way, but it was up to the officer to decide whether they were willing to pay for it. In hindsight, these noncommissioned officers were instructive in how I would confront my problems at The New Yorker.

My path to becoming a shop steward began with a mental health day. I’d never had the self-respect to ask for one before, but the news during the pandemic had become overwhelming. I called my boss at the time, explained the situation, and perhaps overshared. That afternoon, I received a notification that my sick day—of which I had an unlimited amount—had been reclassified. My boss had used my own words as justification for charging the day as personal time. I had been got.

When I was later nominated to be a shop steward and then the first vice chair, I accepted both because I knew it was an opportunity to resolve my hangups with work: the way the workplace encouraged one’s self-worth to be tied to its success among them. Volunteering with the union was a way to both transform and share the transformation, to help others along the way. The New Yorker was a study in contradiction, a place that prioritized humanity while also being needlessly cruel. Everyone agreed that working conditions needed to change, but few wanted to upset their manager. Most people preferred the fantasy of the institution to its reality.

In turn, organizers took on the sublimated resentment that workers carried. I came to understand that it was part and parcel of the organization: if you realized something wasn’t right, you were made to feel alone. When overshadowed by one another’s talent and accomplishment, you start to believe that you have more to lose than most; especially in an environment suggesting that a dozen smarter, more talented candidates stood ready to take your place.

But the lengthy and acidic negotiation of our first collective bargaining agreement, began to break this delusion. It forced the staff to confront this duality. And with each crisis, two rounds of surprise layoffs, for example—staffers learned the importance of our union and their individual responsibility within it. It was an education birthed from what seemed like random but grievous acts from Condé Nast. Powerlessness turned into an effort to change the culture, and soon, collective action became the norm.

During one of the layoffs in 2023, shop members marched together to demand an answer for this unprecedented bloodletting. By showing our displeasure with as many members as possible, we convinced Condé Nast to hold an extraordinary negotiation to expand layoff benefits—benefits that were immediately extended to nonunion staffers. These victories required constant vigilance.

It became a regular affair to walk up to David Remnick, who routinely answered our questions by claiming that he was unaware of the issue or powerless to change anything. Consequently, we would seek out the CEO or the head of human resources to see if maybe the buck stopped there. With our hearts pounding, we often marched behind Hannah Aizenman, our unit chair, who stood nearly a head shorter than me. Walking with her reminded me of the pre-mission feeling of danger and anticipation—the kind of blitz that used to surge through me before we set out on missions. In those moments, you felt dizzy from the heady switch between the physical and metaphysical feeling of power. When we found the boss, Hannah would calmly put forth our questions. When no executive was present—which was most of the time—she would deliver a rabble-rousing speech detailing why the circumstances were so wrong. More importantly, she would tell us how we would fix them: together.

Our speedy musters and growing numbers were exhibiting the power we were building. A week before I was fired, I told the new officers beginning their term that the union had never been more powerful but Condé Nast had never been more erratic. Our strength seemed to grow, even as the magazine tried to suck it dry. The New Yorker’s leadership has been quiet about my firing; they’ve acted like they have no power here. But the company’s legal inability to fire me has been challenged by dozens of senior editors and department heads, including my boss. Even they had the courage to speak up on my behalf. Why couldn’t their bosses?

In the days after I was fired, I pleaded to Mike Luo my case for not changing course and publishing two pieces I had written about the Chinese community in New York City that I had worked on for a year. They were challenging endeavors, reported and written over a year, while I balanced organizing and fact-checking. He told me that he wasn’t sure if my termination would make it “inconvenient” to publish them. They were killed a week later, for “editorial reasons.”

Today, I find myself a beneficiary amid this steep ascent in organizing power. Though our collective bargaining agreement stipulates that disagreements be mediated by arbitration, there is no provision against extending the process indefinitely by simply refusing dates. The company declined five of these meetings, prompting my union to fire off several more reply-alls and to print a nearly life-size cutout of me—the same image that appeared in the New York Post. Finally, the company agreed to a date this upcoming May.

It’s telling of the leadership at Condé Nast that nobody had thought through the consequences of firing union leaders, especially ones that had stewarded members through such a turbulent time. The Labor Relations department, for instance, has told our union that this is a corporation, not a democratic town square.

This is a laughable business justification. The point isn’t to workshop despotism; it’s to make and sell a profitable magazine. In decision after decision, the company has a questionable record in proving its fiduciary duty. That’s been a problem since some of the last successful magazines in America remain in the company’s remit. By firing the four of us, Condé Nast has once again, forced everyone to stop ignoring the company’s ridiculous decisions and reckon with them. And in doing so, it has created a new kind of character in our unions. Its members are a force that mobilizes more quickly and they are ready to escalate actions if they are not being heard.

My job at The New Yorker felt like a dream as much as it ended like one. Still, I remain astounded by the incredible talent and care from my coworkers who continue to meet the demands of publishing a weekly magazine while risking their jobs to advocate for their colleagues—of whom I have unexpectedly become the focus. I imagine that it must evoke some ambivalence among members: Advancement requires competition, but an ethical contest requires collective action. In a workplace shaped by arbitrary power, those instincts collide.

I am living in the aftermath of that collision—terminated by an arbitrary decision—yet conscious that I’m the one who has to behave professionally to avoid retaliation and maintain a career as a writer. I share this position with hundreds of recently fired journalists who are forced to blame no one, allowed only to describe their careers as a result of whimsy and luck. What is left of long-form narrative nonfiction now feels a lot like a house built precariously on the edge of a seaside cliff. The views are perfect, but the cliff is crumbling. It often seems like our unions are the only ones recognizing this and attempting to shore up the rock.

My therapist often tells me to externalize my inner critics as demons with recognizable features like horns and sharp teeth. I realize now that I’ve imagined them wrong. They are coiffed, glassy-eyed, and pearly-toothed, with the kind of plastic face that resembles a mask. One reason I kept my responsibilities in the union was to have real and external attacks; to separate my inner demons from the real ones. During a particularly memorable appointment with my psychiatrist last summer, I told him that I was feeling increasingly paranoid from fact-checking pieces about the new administration and how the Labor Relations department was threatening me with discipline in response to our union’s collective actions. He demurred and said he could not, in good conscience, prescribe anything that would dull my awareness of my surroundings. What I was telling him was real. You see, the problem wasn’t in my head—it was in the facts.