RM: So are you going to do that piece for the Times?

JJS: I think so.

RM: Seems to me that your job at the Times is the greatest gig in the world. Three of your last six stories—Disneyland, Ireland, and Cuba—were basically paid vacations. And in the fourth, you just got a bunch of massages. What’s going on there? What type of stories are you drawn to for the Times?

JJS: It has me a little spun around right now, actually. When the Cuba story came out, and I saw the cover, which I thought was one of the most beautiful magazine covers I’d ever seen, I was like, You’re a schmuck if you don’t deal with the fact that you have the coolest job right now. They’ll let you write about anything you’re interested in, and they’re putting you on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and they’re giving you space. And that just initiated a terror. Partly because I’m disappointed with myself, so far in the stuff I’ve done for the Times. I don’t feel like I’ve really figured out how to write for a weekly magazine yet. My whole nervous system was geared to the old monthly thing, where the panic sets in, but it’s not really time to panic, because you really have about a week before it’s going out.  But at a weekly, it’s different, man. If they say the thing is going out the door on Friday, it’s going out the door on Friday, and you might be running after it in tears. But I’m figuring it out. My first drafts have gotten a little bit stronger, I think.

RM: And your subject matter has been pretty sunny, so far. There are undertones of your big themes, but it never gets too heavy or dark. 

JJS: I think it’s been a little softy softy. Because we have kids. And I just can’t bring myself to try to pretend like it’s anything else. It would just feel like I was trying to be, who’s the guy who wrote Jarhead?

RM: Anthony Swofford?