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Jake Silverstein

Jake Silverstein is the former editor in chief of Texas Monthly. He attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and also received degrees from Hollins University, in Roanoke, Virginia, and the Michener Center for Writers, at the University of Texas at Austin. In the late nineties, he worked as a reporter for the Big Bend Sentinel, a weekly newspaper in Marfa. In 2005 he became a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine. His first book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction, was published in 2010 by W. W. Norton. His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Best American Travel Writing 2003 and Submersion Journalism (2008). He joined the staff of Texas Monthly as a senior editor in 2006. In 2008 he was named the fourth editor of the magazine. During his editorship, which ended in 2014, the magazine was nominated for eleven National Magazine Awards (the industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) and won two, for general excellence and feature writing. Silverstein lives in New York and is the editor of the New York Times Magazine.

118 Articles

Food & Drink|
November 14, 2013

Food, Glorious Food

Were it not for the fact that it looked a little weird on the cover, I would’ve insisted that we call this a food issue, not the food issue. Magazines are always putting out what they call “the Food Issue,” and this is precisely what we set out to do six

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Texas History|
October 15, 2013

The Assassination at 50

In November 1973, Texas Monthly, which was still in its first year of existence, marked the tenth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy with a profile of Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother, Marguerite; the cover, however, went to Tom Landry. Two years later, in November 1975, the

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Reporter|
October 11, 2013

The Man Who Was There

For fifty years, journalist Hugh Aynesworth has been one of the foremost authorities on the Kennedy assassination for one simple reason: he saw it all.

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Politics & Policy|
September 17, 2013

Follow the Money

Money and politics. There’s a reason this issue features a report on wealth in Texas alongside a pair of stories that look ahead to the 2014 elections. Despite the occasional quixotic effort to remove the former from the latter, the two are deeply intertwined. Only in very rare instances does

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Editor's Letter|
August 12, 2013

Why We Put Johnny Football on Our Cover

By nine p.m. Eastern Standard Time on the second Saturday in December last year, we knew exactly who would be on the cover this month. That was the night that Johnny Manziel became the first freshman ever to win the Heisman Trophy. As soon as the holidays were over, we began

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Politics & Policy|
July 15, 2013

Capitol Gains

Politics can usually be described along the same lines as that old cliché about the weather: if you don’t like it, just wait five minutes and it’ll change. The will of the electorate is fickle, as constant in its attachment to any particular politician as to any particular variety of breakfast

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The Culture|
June 10, 2013

Editor’s Letter

Every year on the Fourth of July, the Austin neighborhood where I live has a fairly extensive parade. It’s about as all-American a scene as you can imagine: flags, classic cars, little kids riding on their parents’ shoulders, the smoky scent of backyard barbecues. Usually there’s at least one person dressed

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Food & Drink|
May 13, 2013

Welcome to the World Wide Web of Barbecue

Things have changed dramatically since we published our last list of the state’s top fifty barbecue joints, in 2008. Not only has there been an unprecedented flourishing of new joints (sixteen of the places on this year’s list were not open five years ago, including two of the top four), and

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Art|
May 6, 2013

Book Child Page 01

Short loin tenderloin cow ribeye swine tongue shankle. Filet mignon tri-tip leberkas cow, pork belly beef short ribs corned beef. Shank venison shankle doner, jerky filet mignon tongue t-bone rump leberkas sausage. Prosciutto meatball meatloaf boudin. Frankfurter t-bone corned beef sausage beef ribs turducken pork belly pork chicken pastrami jowl

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Editor's Letter|
April 10, 2013

Revealing Secrets

I am not ashamed to say that after reading the first draft of this month’s cover story on the Texas coast, by the intrepid and thoughtful Dan Oko, I experienced a fleeting hesitation about publishing it at all. Perhaps we could call a last-minute audible and put Lance Armstrong

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Editor's Letter|
March 11, 2013

Editor’s Letter

In March 2003 the best-selling female band in American history touched the third rail of country music. A decade later, the Dixie Chicks belong mostly to history, and the recent recording of two separate albums by the former bandmates underscores the fact that the Chicks, as Chicks, are more or less

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February 14, 2013

Editor’s Letter

Austin is known, somewhat ostentatiously, as the Live Music Capital of the World, but as any longtime resident knows, the best show in town is not a musical performance at all. In fact, it is mostly tuneless, it has little in the way of rhythm, and no one has ever tried

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Politics & Policy|
February 14, 2013

Editor’s Letter

Austin is known, somewhat ostentatiously, as the Live Music Capital of the World, but as any longtime resident knows, the best show in town is not a musical performance at all. In fact, it is mostly tuneless, it has little in the way of rhythm, and no one has ever tried

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Books|
January 24, 2013

The Artist and the City

For thirty years, when she wasn’t writing books or winning genius grants, Sandra Cisneros has been pushing and prodding San Antonio to become a more sophisticated (and more Mexican) city. Now she’s leaving town. did she succeed?

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