My internship at National Review has come to an end. The editors were kind enough to allow me to pay tribute to this incredible publication and thank them for the amazing experience that writing for NR has been these past three months.
I have been a reader of National Review since I was a freshman in high school. The first morning of my internship, I attended the morning editorial calls via Zoom. Seeing the faces of the writers whose work I had read for many years, and hearing them discuss what they were going to write about that day, frequently interspersed with a dose of humor, was a thrill. Having Phil Klein ask me what stories I wanted to work on was incredibly exciting. I was lucky enough to have had a couple of stories published in NR before my internship, but being part of the editorial calls every morning, getting to know the writers and editors, and working on stories each day really made me feel as if I were a part of the NR team.
I worked remotely from my D.C. apartment this summer. Like a good intern, I dutifully donned a dress shirt and tie for each Zoom editorial call, an ensemble that was summarily tossed in favor of a Grateful Dead T-shirt and shorts the minute the meetings ended. Jack Butler, you win; the truth is finally out.
There have been many stories I’ve enjoyed working on this summer. Among them, “The Ridiculous Attacks on Dan Crenshaw,” which got many comments, both positive and negative, and yes, I did read them. It certainly demonstrates the diverse readership of NR. Another story I enjoyed writing that also elicited polarizing comments was “Is the January 6 Committee Cheney’s Last Stand?“ On a lighter note, my NR internship gave me the unique opportunity to interview the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh about his movie, What Is a Woman?, and write “Matt Walsh Stumps the Left with One Simple Question.” After the Uvalde shooting, I wrote about a much more serious story from which I learned a good deal: the mental-health epidemic affecting young men in America and why these heinous acts are often committed by this demographic in “America’s Young Men in Crisis.”
While the focal point of my internship was the writing, the NR staff really made an effort to include the interns in various social events, both in Washington and New York City. Again, they went out of their way to make us feel as if we were part of the team.
As I head off to Brown this fall (in response to the most common query in the comment section, a “rising senior” is a student who has finished his junior year and is approaching his senior year), I will take the myriad lessons I have learned at NR and put them to good use. When the far-left ideologues on campus inevitably do something outlandish this year, I hope I can document it for these pages once again.