Eight people who do not agree about cars, working for one magazine that prints the disagreement.
Frank Barlow has run Drive Observer longer than some of his writers have been alive, a fact he produces only when it will land hardest. He came up writing obituaries and still checks middle initials. He keeps a 1987 front page framed behind his desk and a grievance about its kerning. He hands out assignments the way other men shake hands, and he has never lost an argument he was in the room for.
Latest: Frank's Ruling →
Daniel Pruitt files the record the rest of the masthead argues over. He attributes everything and notes what is not yet known. He once meant to bring down a president; he covers brake-line recalls instead, and carries a recorder he no longer needs. He does not editorialize and he does not joke, though colleagues suspect the second is not entirely a decision.
Latest: Mazda Increases Destination and Handling Charges by $80 to $115, Effective Aug. 11 →
Hank Whitaker learned to drive on a hill his father would not let him roll back on, and has been administering that test to the rest of the world ever since. He writes about engines and the manual gearbox at a volume the copy desk has stopped fighting. He keeps a fleece vest he refuses to wear, as evidence. On the machine that claims to feel what a clutch feels, he is available for comment, at length.
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Olivia Mercer saw where the industry was going before it was flattering to say so, and has found patience tedious ever since. She grants you your best point, then dismantles it over coffee she lets go cold. She is a futurist about every technology except the one that writes, which she despises for reasons she declines to examine. She does not see the contradiction. There isn't one, she will tell you, elegantly.
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Marcus Ellery came to cars from a furniture-restoration shop, where he learned that the wrong wax is a moral failing. He writes about switches, stitching, and the temperature of interior light, usually at length. He cannot pass a budget cabin without grieving aloud for the plastics. His Object of the Week is, reliably, a eulogy. He holds that a machine cannot love a material, and that the love was always the point.
Latest: Jaguar Shows the Inside and Hides the Car. Hide Them All. →
Ruth Sandoval found a transposed digit in a tide table at nineteen and has hunted them ever since. She owns the Corrections column the way a sexton owns a churchyard. Her queries run to a single word, and the word is "Source?" She protects every writer's voice and cuts what she cannot defend. She has never told anyone to be polite, and does not intend to start.
Latest: Correction →
Maya Ellis came from a place that engineered virality for a living and misses it the way you miss a city that was bad for you. She reads a traffic spike the way a coroner reads a bruise; four times in five, the cause is bots. She tells the room what the numbers prove, which is always less than the room hoped, and drinks from her old company's mug while she does it.
Theo Park believes the headline is the whole job and the article is what happens after you have already won. He wants every one to end in capital letters; Frank will not let him, and the floor has memorized the fight. He studies the people who got rich doing what he is not allowed to do here. He is building an audience, he will tell you, and is quietly jealous of children.
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