Send to a Friend
			Printer Friendly Format
			Leave Feedback
			Read Feedback
			Nerve RSS

Let's start at the beginning. You were one of the very first people who worked at Nerve.

Apart from the founders and Joey, I was the second person hired with Lorelei. Almost immediately after Lorelei.

What was your position when you were hired?

I think I was nominally the senior editor. [laughter] It was Rufus, me and Genevieve doing the editing, so by virtue of there being nobody else, I got to be called senior. Very exciting. I was a grad student. My options were teaching Chaucer at East Bunghole State or working for a hot sex magazine in New York. Right. So, it took me a long time to decide what to do.

How did you know Rufus?

He was one of my best buds in college. We had always planned on working together, or at least that's what I always say. More to the point, probably, I had always hoped that I'd be able to use him for contacts. He knew that I was a Midwesterner and

promotion

would slave for nickels, so it made sense to hire me.

What was the state of the website at that time?

They were publishing two things a week. They had already published a fair number of quality writers. I was impressed that their initial sort of letter blitz had reeled in quite a few big names. When I started working there, my ambition was to publish something new every day. It took me a while to ramp us up to that, and it certainly cost a lot of blood and tears.

That must have been wildly ambitious at the time.

What frequently happened is I'd have a hole on my editorial calendar. I'd see that there wasn't a piece. So I would write one. In some ways, this led to me developing a freelance career. I would start my column [Jack's Naughty Bits],

Where They Are Now

Former Nerve editor-in-chief Jack Murnighan just finished a proposal for a book on how to read the classics for pleasure. He lives in New York City and teaches magazine writing at the University of the Arts.

which became weekly. Out of vanity, I once figured out how many pieces that I had written for Nerve, and it was well over 400.

How would you describe the magazine at the time?

Very ambitious. We had that super-slick front page. That was badass — there was no text on it, just this awesome living-room scene that you would have to drag the mouse around. This was back before we understood marketing. [laughter] We understood aesthetics, but not marketing. Clearly, that's how we operated for a long time.



We tried to be really smart. That was the brand-building stage. When we were finally called the New Yorker of sex by somebody, we about wet ourselves with happiness, because that's what we had been hoping to be the whole time.

What was the work environment like?

It was pretty fucking funny. We were all working in the loft Rufus and Genevieve were living in at the time. They had a little back bedroom. Until we had maybe seven employees other than Rufus and Genevieve, we all worked at desks around the side walls of this office. Every time Joey would go into the kitchen to make himself a cappuccino, I could block the exit and make him listen to lectures about literature. [laughter] That was fun. And we all loved dancing. Even when there were fifteen of us, every single person utterly loved dancing. So we would frequently have little dance parties. I thought, "How is it possible that thirteen editors and computer programmers can dance?" [laughter] "How is that possible?" The comical thing is, none of us were particularly sexually savvy or active. But when you have a dancing soul? That's the precondition for good sex.



The way that this office is — people have never talked about their sex lives. Almost none of us had any sex lives! That I would write tons of articles about sex and that Emma and Lorelei would advise people about sex? This could have not been further from imaginable at the time. But Nerve gave us a little license and loosened us up.

What shocked you?

I don't think I shock very easily, but one thing was kind of disturbing. We were compiling a huge database of sex- and sexual-health-related websites. I was nominally spearheading this. One website was all cartoons of exceptionally buxom, bright pastel pixies with those little wings and whatnot, flitting about in inappropriate outfits. But they were all snuffed. They were hung and mutilated and chopped up, with plastic bags over their heads. That was someone's thing They have the internet so they can talk to each other.

What was your family's response?

Oh, my family doesn't really know I exist, so that makes it easier. My family hasn't read anything I've ever written regardless. If I'd been publishing in Spaniels and Labradors Quarterly, they still wouldn't have read anything.