I was working at the magazine [The New Yorker] as a fact-checker and my parents no longer considered me a failure, not because they read or admired it, but because when they said its name to friends and relatives it sparkled on their tongues. I still wasn’t a doctor or engineer, but the publication cast a flattering light on them, revealing them to be open minded enough to let me pursue a non-traditional field, yet strict enough to propel me to its most rarefied strata. I liked to name-drop where I worked, too, especially when meeting someone for the first time, though I made a point of not bringing it up until I was asked. For almost two years, things went smoothly. I had insurance and I was making more money than ever before. At work, I checked a lot of the “back of the book” pieces, which often involved going to the movies or reading novels on company time. I would write emails suggesting minor corrections:

Almodóvar’s debut was released in 1980, not 79 as is written, and Penelope Cruz’s character has sex in the first ten, not five, minutes of the film. Screenshots with timings attached.

[...]

I stopped checking movie reviews and spent the ensuing months verifying how many people died in Palestine and the ways in which they died, calling people on the phone to ask how, precisely, their relative had been killed. The work fell to me because none of the other checkers spoke Arabic. At first, it seemed important to me that the language we used reflect the horror of what was happening. But I was defeated in trying to secure the most basic changes:

from: terrorist to: militant

add ‘occupied’ before ‘West Bank’

from ‘Israeli War of Independence’ to ‘the Nakba’

I wrote up a style guide and circulated it among the checkers and copy editors, though I don’t know if anyone ever used it. I started to feel a target growing on my back and stopped fighting as much. I was exhausted. The work was shredding me, and I was not sleeping well. I stayed up late scrolling Twitter and watching Al Jazeera, the tide of images of destruction and death washing over me, leaving me feeling raw and psychotic. When people asked how I was doing, I laughed. Horrible, I said, like it was a great punchline. Friendly members of the editorial staff informed me that some of my older colleagues were calling me a terrorist sympathizer.

Around four months into the war on Gaza, scholars of genocide were reaching a consensus that what was happening in Palestine was a genocide, the crime of crimes, and I waited for the magazine to say so, too. I tried to talk to the editor-in-chief about using the word in our coverage, but he said he didn’t think it was a genocide. The word’s conspicuous absence led me to suspect that he had prohibited its usage among the editors. This was a notable exception to the accepted epistemology; a few months into the job, I overheard another checker cold call an addiction scholar to confirm that gambling was, in fact, addictive. But I did not have it in me to keep fighting. I justified this to myself by saying that the war machine would not be halted by any linguistic alteration I might make in a magazine mostly skimmed over by American suburbanites while they pooped.