Archive Event Highlight
VIDEO: How I Did It – Anand Gopal and Christopher Cox
On Feb. 15, the OPC hosted a discussion with Anand Gopal, an OPC Award-winner and a club member who is a writer for The New Yorker magazine. Also joining the program was Christopher Cox, his former editor at Harper’s magazine. Harper’s was the first prominent magazine to publish Gopal’s work. Gopal wrote two pieces for Cox when he was an editor there in 2012-2014, one about Syria and the other about Afghanistan.
The moderator was Mary Rajkumar, a governor of the OPC and the international investigations editor for The Associated Press.
Click the window above to watch a playlist of clips from the program.
Rajkumar asked Gopal and Cox a series of “behind the scenes” questions about the process of pitching, reporting and editing stories, and motivations and safety considerations in their work.
Gopal is a four-time winner of the OPC’s Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine-style, long-form feature writing. Two of the four winning stories were published in The New Yorker (“The Other Afghan Women” and “Syria’s Last Bastion of Freedom”), one in The Atlantic (“The Hell After ISIS”), and one (“The Uncounted”) in The New York Times Magazine with Azmat Khan.
Cox is now an editor at New York magazine, after stints at Harper’s, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. He has worked on stories that won the Pulitzer Prize, multiple National Magazine Awards, and edited a story that won the OPC’s Ed Cunningham Award in 2014: Rowan Jacobsen’s “The Homeless Herd.”
Gopal is the author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes. He is currently working on a book about a town in Syria and its brief experiment in democracy.
This program was part of the OPC’s “How I Did It Series,” which offers members the opportunity to interact with highly successful journalists.
