Tribute: John Homans

john homans edited features at New York for not quite 20 years, from 1994 to 2014. A disproportionate number of our most memorable stories came through his hands, and the shape and sound and worldview and talent pool of this place would have been immeasurably lessened without him. John died on July 29, at 62, and the tributes from colleagues past and present immediately started pouring in. Here, a tiny selection, with far more at nymag.com.

Ariel Levy (writer): He was not so much your editor as your guru. I didn’t just trust him to tell me what to do with a story; I trusted him to tell me what to do with my life.

Joe Hagan (writer): He was a vision-quest editor: He gave you a mandate, in this oracular style that’s hard to describe. When I was tired, depressed, demoralized, he’d say, “Oh, this is the sport of kings, man! We’re lucky! This is the great fortune—the world is ours to go have fun with!” Then you’d turn in a manuscript and he’d always say the same thing: “It’s gonna be great!” And it’s the worst thing you can say, but it also gives you hope!

Gabriel Sherman (writer): “It’s gonna be great!” Which means it’s a fucking disaster. But he knows it’ll be great, because he’ll fix it. [On my first story for New York] I hadn’t heard from him—are they gonna kill it?—and this edit comes back, and, I mean, I still don’t know how he did it. Completely transformed.

Adam Moss (editor-in-chief, 2004–2019):

He would roll his eyes—he had an amazingly jaundiced view of everything, totally irreverent, totally sarcastic—but it was with an incredible amount of affection. A strange mix of cynicism and awe.

Christopher Bonanos (editor): You never saw anybody work the way he did. You’d pass his office and hear muttering: Mmmhuhhh, okay, what the fuck am I doing now, okay, hmmnk,

uhhh, yeah, all right, now what hmmm yeah. The key sentence, the one we regularly heard leaping out of the stream of noise, was What the fuck?

Which meant, Okay, what do I do next?

Chris Smith (writer): Anyone who worked with John can cite Homansisms. The most common is probably “Excellente!” When I was learning to be a political columnist, he told me, “It’s good to be right. But you always need to be interesting.”

Eric Konigsberg (writer): “It’s a straight shot” meant to report the hell out of something and let the material point the way. “As an activity, it’s a bowl of candy” was a way of reminding you to have fun. Geoffrey Gray (writer): The goal was always

to achieve “good sport.”

Caroline Miller (editor-in-chief, 1996–2004):

John was brilliant at editing without putting his fingers on the keyboard. If a story wasn’t working, he could talk the writer through.

Jada Yuan (writer): His was a universal, gender-neutral, age-agnostic sink-or-swim policy. If he found you at all semi-capable and you came to him with an idea, his general response was “Why not?”

Carl Swanson (writer-editor): His attitude

seemed to be: Do it yourself if you can—you might not have the talent, but you might.

Jared Hohlt (editor): He did his job with such wit and sly wisdom. He did it so creatively—and quickly. He yelled creatively.

Amy Larocca (writer): We never got into one of his legendary scream-a-thons, but I was a great fan of listening in. “Take some fucking words out! It’s like a fucking Victorian living room in there.”

Steve Fishman (writer): Once, we argued about a single word in my draft. I don’t recall which. It got so loud that it frightened the interns who sat outside his office, as they later told me.

David Haskell (editor-in-chief, 2019–present):

He left New York six years ago, but he probably still deserves a salary because I think about him every time we close an issue.

Mark Jacobson (writer): Got a text from Homans the other day. Usually, he just calls and says, “What’s going on there?” But this said, “Looks like curtains. I’m in Sinai.” For a moment, I thought he meant the Sinai Peninsula, doing a rewrite of the Ten Commandments, ripping out some of the more arcane numbers.

Vanessa Grigoriadis (writer): The first time I walked into New York Magazine, I heard John Homans screaming at some hapless writer on the phone. I vowed to steer clear of him. Then my boss left and Homans inherited me as his assistant. At night, I would go into our publishing system and read the stories that had been filed to him and then I would read the revised story when it came out in the magazine. He could drop three sentences into an eight-page piece and transform it. When he called, you wanted him to yell “You scored!” or “This is pure poetry” instead of “It’s like nail soup, Vanessa. Just keep working on it, and eventually we’ll have soup.”

In more recent years, I wasn’t as nervous about Homans’s calls. I knew when my story was good or bad or unprintable. I wish we had more time together, but most writers don’t get 24 years with an editor, let alone an honest, loyal, kind friend. When I called him last week, he announced, “I’m fucked. I’m a goner.” And we both knew it was true.