When I became the editor of聽国产吃瓜黑料聽in early 1999, the 22-year-old magazine was riding impossibly high鈥攁nd falling apart. In one of those mysterious temperamental spasms that sometimes grips even thriving publications, most of the editorial team that had brought so much success and acclaim in the nineties abruptly decamped for opportunities elsewhere, taking key contributors and vast stores of institutional memory out the door.
As part of the reboot, I took one of my luckiest steps on the way to reimaginging a 21st-century聽国产吃瓜黑料聽by hiring a dark-horse freelancer named Mark Jenkins as a monthly columnist, making a bet that he could uphold the heroic standards of predecessors like David Quammen, Tim Cahill, and Randy Wayne White. It paid off. Jenkins鈥攃limber, endurance athlete, ethicist of risk, connoisseur聽of dicey situations, orthopedic basket case鈥攖urned out to be the perfect writer at the right time, and the living embodiment聽of the unkillable idea of literate badass adventure that has been聽国产吃瓜黑料's聽guiding star.
All of his reportorial and expeditionary audacity, along with his predilection聽for the ill-advised and the near fatal, are on spellbinding display in his synoptic post-9/11 chronicle of traversing a half-forgotten region of Afghanistan (“A Short Walk in the Wakhan聽Corridor,” November 2005). So evocative that you can smell the opium fumes and yak dung, his prose delivers a hair-raising vision of geopolitical explorations as both dream and nightmare. Mark survived to tell the tale鈥攁nd, I'm proud to say, so did聽国产吃瓜黑料.
鈥擧al聽Espen, Editor, 1999-2006