Every year, the 52 Places to Go issue is the most popular one the Travel section does. It’s also the most complicated.

There’s the print product, of course, with its lush, I-wish-I-were-there photography. There’s the online version, with videos scattered throughout. And this year, we added yet another layer: the 52 Places Traveler — a writer-at-large who will go to each and every spot on the list in 2018.

So at the same time that we were sifting through suggestions of which places to include, and how to rank them, from dozens of our regular contributors — who, frankly, know the world a lot better than we editors do — we were also sifting through more than 13,000 submissions (yes, you read that right) for an unprecedented and much-talked-about job posting.