Boom!

For the first time in many years, a column of mine just got killed. I have been muffled, silenced. It was going to run right here, right now, in this space. But some Jewish asshole killed it.

It was me. I did it to me.

Who else could have done it? I don’t work for anyone except you, and you can’t have killed it, because I didn’t show it to you because I killed it.

My point is, journalism can be hard. Sometimes it takes a smart friend or two to persuade you, correctly, that something you have written should not see the light of day.

This got me thinking about the light of day, which reminded me of the aha! lightbulb of inspiration:

… Which reminded me of a major moment in my professional development. It was the moment I spied that exact copy of Esquire, above, on a rack in a convenience store, and I realized what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

It was late March 1982. I had recently been hired by The Miami Herald to be the assistant editor of Tropic, its Sunday magazine. The magazine had a good staff. Excellent writers. But it wasn’t connecting with readers. There were almost no letters to the editor. And I feared I had no idea how to help it.

I just stared at the magazine cover on the shelf, and, boom.

The covers of Esquire Magazine of that era were influenced by a former advertising genius named George Lois; he ran that front page like an unforgettable ad, week after week, the kind of ad that doesn’t state its point directly, but teases at it, and counts on the wit of the reader to understand the implication, to get the joke. Lois felt a magazine must develop a personality, an attitude, in which the reader becomes not just a reader but a partner.

The Esquire cover was about a leaked government contingency plan for how to deal with nuclear holocaust, city by city. The cover doesn’t directly say, hey, your leaders are reckless idiots — it says they have a “swell” plan. (You know, for when they annihilate the world.)

I got it. And took it back to the office. And in due time, with the help of a great staff, Tropic became a whole new, daring magazine with a rabid, cultish following.

For a story on the sad truth about most animal shelters, we had a closeup of a cute puppy, with the headline:

See Spot Die

This was our story in which we tried to start a basketball rivalry between the Miami Heat and the new team a few hundred miles north:

People agreed to suffer indignity for a place on our cover:

… Or even if they didn’t exactly agree. This was the whole cover:

After it became obvious that Miami’s new Metro system was so unwisely laid out that its ridership would be pathetically small:

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What is my point here? My point is, I was feeling depressed and found a way to make myself feel better.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

And finally, speaking of January 6, and muscular storytelling, and daring writing, I urge you all to read this magnificent story by Ellie Silverman in today’s Wapo. Brilliantly done, with a breathtaking, courageous end.