PROVINCETOWN — At the bar at Mac’s on Feb. 2, Tyler Jager ate his first Wellfleet oyster with a bright squeeze of lemon. He had his second with nothing at all. It was cold, clean, and briny: a direct shot of this place itself. Some things, the act seemed to say, are best understood without embellishment.
Jager, who joins the Independent this winter thanks to a Mary Heaton Vorse journalism fellowship, carries that same instinct into his reporting. He wants to let whatever he’s learning about stand on its own while he gets to know it.
For the next five months, Jager will cover the Wellfleet beat. Last week, his first story was a foray into that town’s annual budget review.
Jager grew up in Manchester, Vt. and studied political science and government at Yale University, where he edited the Yale Review of International Studies and Brink, the undergraduate book review. During college, he volunteered with the International Rescue Committee and interned for Foreign Affairs magazine.
He started out interested in ethnography, but a creative nonfiction workshop with journalist Sarah Stillman, who runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, shifted his interest to investigative journalism. She taught him to write with precision and detail, he says, while also considering the ethics involved in gathering people’s stories.
Under Stillman’s mentorship, Jager spent four months investigating lead contamination in refugee housing in New Haven. At least seven families had unknowingly settled into apartments leaching toxic levels of lead. A 7,000-word story, titled “Second Exile,” was the result, published on May 17, 2022 in The New Journal at Yale.
Every two weeks, he visited one Afghan family for dinner, listening as they spoke not of the lead exposure but of Afghanistan and the people they left behind, of the mosque in West Haven, of their kids settling into local schools, and of the other small anchors they were trying to set in unfamiliar ground. The lead contamination was the story, but it was never the only story, he says.
After graduating in 2023, Jager attended the University of Cambridge as a Kings-Yale Scholar. On Friday nights, he took the train to London for a reading group on Hegel hosted by the philosopher’s preeminent contemporary scholar, Richard Bourke.
Jager’s dissertation at Cambridge focused on liberalism in the 19th century, particularly figures like John Stuart Mill, who was both a philosopher and a member of Parliament. Studying the period gave him an introduction to arguments about globalization and the idea that free trade and free movement go together.
Last July, Jager finished nine months at Cambridge with a master’s in political thought and intellectual history. After a stint in Bushwick, Brooklyn, Jager moved to Provincetown in January.
He was drawn here for reasons both obvious and ineffable. He liked that the Independent is committed to print at a time when many other outlets have abandoned it. “I can’t think of a lot of analogues,” he says.
There was also the Outer Cape itself, where he camped as a kid with his family. He is interested in the way it manages to be both transient and constant.
“There’s gay stuff, marine stuff, and we’re in one of the most lucrative real estate markets,” says Jager, naming just some of the subjects he hopes he’ll be writing about here. The fellowship offered a chance to dig in and do some real local reporting. The Indie’s weekly schedule means news stories are usually about 1,000 words long. “I was ready to be game,” he says.
