Though practitioners in Basic Writing studies often refer to "the politics of remediation," there are few pedagogical models that address how to teach this facet of professional life to graduate students and emerging professionals. Most often, this knowledge is transmitted through storytelling, namely narrative-based accounts of Basic Writing professionals engaging with other institutional stakeholders during moments of institutional change. This article provides some results from a qualitative study of such publications in "JBW" from 1995-2015 to highlight how a range of distant and close reading practices (Mueller) might serve to illuminate disciplinary patterns, thereby providing graduate students with new insights into the politics of the field.