I have to be honest. In recent years, I, a magazine features editor, have been turning against magazine features. Or at least a certain kind of them. You might know the ones I mean. They all start the same way: “On a frigid night last December,” or whatever, “Sally Who-Cares got out of bed.” God. I know there’s a time and place for time-and-place leads, but does anyone have the time, in any place, for this kind of old-school magazine storytelling anymore? The future-oriented WIRED editor in me was especially sensitive to the outdatedness of the convention, a remnant of a time when we perused dead-tree media on couches and were fine to be lulled into long, involved narratives. In my darkest moments, I was prepared to give up the genre of “narrative longform” entirely and focus my efforts instead on, I don’t know, reviewing sci-fi TV shows. Or publishing outrageous manifestos. Or making YouTubes.
But then a story comes along that reminds you why magazines exist and matter. Last year, after I published a feisty Q&A with the young CEO of a fertility startup, I got an email from a freelancer named Emi Nietfeld. She, like me, thought that fertility—a freakish obsession of Silicon Valley’s tech elite and adjacent quasi-intellectuals—was undercovered by the media, and she had stories on the subject she wanted to pitch. “But are they dramatic stories, Emi?” I asked. “Will anyone actually want to read them?” Then I said: “At this point, if it’s not ‘Bad Art Friend,’ I don’t want it.”
“Bad Art Friend,” if you somehow don’t remember, was published by NYT Mag back in 2021, and it will likely go down in history as one of the last great magazine stories ever written. From the pettiest of premises is spun a human drama of such silly-epic proportions that you question your moralities, your loyalties, everything. “Surely,” I said to Emi, “in the fraught world of 21st-century babymaking, there must be something like that. Something that will make people sit up and want to talk.”
A year later, I’m proud to publish Emi’s first WIRED feature: “The Baby Died. Whose Fault Is It?” She is a writer of rare humanity, instinct, and drive, and I hope it’s the first of many. I will say again: It restores my faith (for the time being, anyway) in narrative longform. And I will add this: Emi does not start the piece with a time-and-place lead.
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