Q+A: Amanda Mull, Staff Writer at The Atlantic

Mull offers insight into how she writes stories that get the internet talking.

The Atlantic staff writer Amanda Mull, though a health writer by title, has made a name for herself by incisively tackling cultural trends and bringing a fresh perspective to stories that seem covered to death (for example, millennial sobriety, reports of which have been greatly exaggerated). Her stories also provoke enthusiastic online conversation, sometimes for days on end, as with her story about travelers who relish a late airport arrival.

The key, she tells Study Hall, is approaching her subjects with curiosity and generosity. “The answer to ‘Why are people doing this thing?’ is never ‘Because these people are really stupid,’” she says. We spoke to Mull about her journey from marketing to fashion blogging to staff writer (she’s a Twitter success story), her approach to covering trends, and what makes a great story.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Study Hall: First of all, what was your foray into journalism like? How did you get started?

Amanda Mull: I took a circuitous route into journalism for somebody who always knew what they wanted to do. I graduated from college in 2008 with a degree in magazine journalism, and that was a particularly bad year to be graduating college at all but even worse to be graduating with a degree in magazine journalism. I graduated with the whole assumption that I would never be a journalist or writer. I had gotten a job in marketing at a resort outside of Atlanta, so I was like, you know what, I’ll work in marketing. I did not have any sort of grand creative ambitions — I’m a practical person. Then I got laid off seven or eight months later when the economy slowly bottomed out.

I had been writing $20 blog posts for a website called Purseblog.com — I had been writing blog posts for them while at work, and I told the people who owned it that I had been laid off and they asked if I wanted to write for them full time, so they hired me in early 2009. They hired me at a sort of 2009 blogging type of salary, but I lived in my college town of Athens, Georgia and it didn’t cost anything so it was fine. So I blogged for a couple years from there, then they moved the company to New York, and when they did I was like you know what, I would like to move also.

Not a lot happened for the first six years that I lived here. I kept working for the website — they were wonderful and let me be creative and let me freelance, but nobody wanted me to freelance for them. And then finally, I got to know people who worked within the broader media industry in the city — mostly through Twitter — and somebody slid into my DMs and asked if I wanted to freelance for them. I wrote my very first freelance article under my own independent byline for Rolling Stone about college football mascots. Then once you have a decent byline you can put it in your Twitter bio and people are more likely to believe you’re an actual writer.

I like to tweet, which is a personal failing, I realize, but I just kept talking publicly about things that I was interested in, things that I enjoyed, things that I knew a lot about, and people started offering me more opportunities to write about stuff, so I just kept writing.

The industry is really walled off and really gate-kept, and I didn’t have a traditional way in, but I could get on the internet and post until my fingers fell off, and that is basically what I did. When you’re an anonymous person with no sort of pedigree or resume, sending cold pitches to editors whose inboxes are flooded just seems like a bad way to use my time, but I figured that if I could get in front of enough eyeballs to become a person that editors and other writers might associate with certain topics, and somebody who has a fun point of view and makes good jokes or whatever, I figured that maybe that would work. I don’t know if it ended up being more efficient, but it is the thing that worked, for better or worse.

SH: I feel like before you landed the Atlantic gig you really carved out a niche for yourself as a freelancer covering fashion — how did you go about coming up with original pitches as a freelancer?

AM: I am a plus-sized person who worked in the fashion industry for a long time, and that’s a Venn diagram overlap that includes like…four people. But people who are interested in reading a perspective from somebody like that includes a ton of people in the United States. There’s just not a lot of people who had that exact same combination of personal experience and professional experience to be able to address issues of size and body image within fashion in a way that had equal knowledge of both parts of the problem.

You get a lot of plus-sized writers who do a great job writing about body issues from a broader cultural perspective, and then you get people within the fashion industry who try to cover size issues, but generally people who aren’t thin don’t make it very far in the fashion industry. So being a person who saw both sides of that gave me sort of a built-in place of expertise that cultural conversations about women’s bodies and aesthetics were ready to hear. I was, to a certain extent, just in the right place at the right time.

SH: How would you describe your beat now?

AM: My beat is sort of elastic. I am technically a health writer at the Atlantic, but really I take health at its broadest definition because to me, health deals a lot with how people relate to their bodies, how people think about themselves, and how people think about their bodies and themselves within grander cultural contexts, so a lot of things can be “health.” I can be a science reporter, but that is not my natural inclination. I think what I can do and what I do best is to try to build a bridge between those things and how people experience the world.

SH: You seem to have a knack for approaching things that everybody’s already talking about in a unique way — like your piece on White Claw or Goop. How do you go about finding an angle for stories about trends?

AM: I think this is one of the strengths that working in the fashion industry for so long gave me, because the fashion industry is a model for how things become cool and then filter out into the broader culture and then sort of disappear. If you work in fashion you watch that cycle happen over and over and over again, and you get really used to what the signals are in deciding where in that cycle a particular trend is. If you position yourself to see things start to bubble up and if you have the context on how ideas grow and spread to understand what’s happening, then you can get on the front end of a lot of trend stories.

People are always interested in how things happen, and why suddenly everybody on their Instagram story is talking about celery juice, and why five years ago nobody had a metal water bottle and how everybody has one. Those things all feel like they come out of nowhere, and figuring out what motivates people to do things and what moves people to adopt new ideas and to telegraph them to others is an essential understanding that’s required to work in the fashion industry. If you can bring that out to a broader set of cultural things then you can write some interesting stories.

And being a curious person and wanting to understand is important. I think that for journalists, especially journalists who live in major metor areas in their late twenties and thirties, things that bubble out outside of that cultural context are dismissed as being dumb or uncool or whatever. But I think if you take people seriously and if you dedicate yourself to understanding why people like a thing or why people find a particular thing interesting, then I think you can always write a more interesting story than a dismissive blog post.

My way of looking at this is: Try and be generous with people, not with companies. You shouldn’t ever believe the company line that a brand gives you, but if you can talk to some people who use a product or use a service and find out what they find compelling about this particular thing, why they have literally and figuratively bought in, then you can probably tell a pretty interesting story about it.

SH: Goop is a perfect example of that. I’m skeptical of Goop the company, but there’s something to be said for why all these women are seeking fulfillment in it.

AM: Right, the answer to “Why are people doing this thing?” is never “Because these people are really stupid.” That is never the answer. But it’s something that I think a lot of people reach for, because it confirms their beliefs about a particular group of people who they think are wasting their money or they think have been duped, or who they want to believe they could never be like. But people act certain ways because of fear and anxiety and some sort of unfulfilled thing that they’re trying to fix. So if you can get over a kneejerk reaction to assume that somebody is stupid because they bought a crystal, then you can figure out what is actually going on.

SH: Somebody on Twitter once said something along the lines of, “If you see a story flying around the Internet and everybody’s talking about it for days, it’s probably an Amanda Mull story.” A great example of that is that story about people who love getting to the airport late. That drove everybody, including me and my friends, insane. What prompted you to write that story, and why do you think that story dominated online discussion like it did?

AM: I know, professionally, the guy whose tweet inspired it, Tim Hererra — his tweet got put in our Slack at the Atlantic and people just talked about it for like an hour. It was an object of fascination in a way that very few topics become in our Slack, and that’s not always a great barometer for a story, but I was talking about it with my editor and he thought it would be an interesting thing to write about if we could figure out a way to explicate the psychology of that. Because like I said, the answer is never that all these people are dumb. What need is being fulfilled by this chronic lateness, by this purposeful lateness? We started looking around trying to find a psychologist or psychiatrist or somebody who could talk to us about this.

It seemed that at its base, people were displaying their relationship with risk and their relationship with anxiety and how they chose to sublimate their anxiety. I got a hold of a psychiatrist and he said “You’re right” — that these types of behaviors are all about what type of relationship people have with their own anxiety.

I think it’s the combination of something that a lot of people are emotional about — nobody likes the airport — and seeing the two super divergent ways people deal with it. If you can figure out what’s going on there in any capacity and illuminate something for people at all then I think that’s a good story, because it deals with something that everybody deals with.

I try to always look for things where there’s a tension between how people talk about something and how people experience it. Because if there’s space between those things, if those two things are in some sort of conflict, then there’s something that people don’t understand there, and if there’s something people don’t understand then maybe there’s something that I can figure out, or call some people who can figure out.

SH: Yeah, and you kind of have to think that nothing is inexplicable, right? That’s something that would be so easy to chalk up to “What are you gonna do, some people just act that way.”

AM: Right, and I think that sort of kneejerk dismissiveness of the “Oh, who knows why people do this,” is sort of the same as “Oh well, they’re just dumb,” in that it is never a good answer. There’s always something going on. There’s a real danger in being a journalist and deciding you’re smarter than everybody you write about. And if you have come to that conclusion about yourself, then you’re probably setting yourself up to do some really bad work.

SH: More generally, what is your reporting process like?

AM: It sort of varies. I have a really good relationship with my editor, and he is a sounding board. I tend to Slack him lots of random thoughts that cross my mind. Sometimes I do a truly annoying thing, which is send him a link to my own Tweet, and then I’m like “Is this anything?” That doesn’t always lead to a story immediately.

I wrote a story this April that was pretty viral about millennial drinking habits, and that story actually started the previous December with me slacking my editor and being like, “I’m sort of sick of drinking lately, is that anything?” And he was like, “I don’t think that’s a story, but if there’s something broader about that then maybe it’s a story.” I just kept paying attention to it and kept asking around, and a few other articles came out about this idea that millennials want to get sober, and that didn’t feel quite right to me, so I kept digging and I finally figured out what I thought was actually the thing going on. Once I had a hunch, I called around to some people to see if they had hard evidence that would back up the hunch, and started looking through some data. Then I finally wrote the story — but it started as a Slack five months earlier.

I am not always the first person to a thing, and of course when that happens I always try to give as much credit as I can to whoever poked at an idea first, but sometimes there’s just a slightly different way into something that has been written about a lot, and I think that is always worth exploring.

SH: It can be discouraging — you start to think there are only so many ideas to be had, and when there’s a million freelancers and roughly five editors accepting pitches it can be a little bit depressing. But it’s true, there’s usually another way into something.

AM: It can be really discouraging to see articles pop up about things you have started thinking about, and if it’s the exact same angle you had been considering it’s time to move on. But if there’s something broader to say about it, if there’s a different perspective into a topic then I think that is always worth teasing out. The Internet is big, there’s a lot of readers, there’s a lot of things to be said on most topics that are worth writing about.

SH: Because you specialize in writing about cultural trends, I wanted to ask: are there any trends right now you especially like? Any trends you especially do not like?

AM: I wrote something a while ago about intuitive eating, which is an alternate theory of how to think about food that I think is gaining a lot of ground, both on the internet as a way to talk about food and among dietitians and nutritionists who are looking for a way to repair people’s relationship with food and with their bodies. That is the most positive trend I’ve come across in recent memory, because I think it really takes into account how people feel about food, in a way that the “food is fuel” set really declines to contend with.

I really hate the wellness industry. I think the wellness industry is a very late-capitalist artifact of intense dread and sadness and depression. Not only do I think that it is not selling anything useful but I think it’s actively harmful to people and their well-being. It sets people up to believe that they can solve their problems by buying things, which is just fundamentally incorrect. A lot of the cultural forces that act on a person are systemic — they are not things that personal consumer choices can affect in any root way, and I think companies selling the idea that a product will turn you into the correct person, into the person you’re supposed to be or should want to be, is really manipulative and evil.

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