Weekend Resolve
Hello. Welcome to the famed Weekend Gene Pool, in which I ritually beg you to send me questions / anecdotes / observations for me to answer next week, in return for interesting disclosures by me, right here. For example I will disclose my last salary at The Washington Post.
But first, here’s another, unrelated disclosure: In the field of medicine, it might be safest to have surgery on Tuesday through Thursday because the best surgeons get to cherrypick the dates of their procedures to avoid the beginning or end of every week, to guarantee a three-day weekend. Mondays and Fridays are not wonderful, fatality-wise. This is sourly contested in the medical community, but apparently true.
That’s the challenge today: What are some interesting secrets of the your job / industry that many people might not know? Trivial is good, but so is serious. Dish.
For example I will now disclose this about writing: Writers get much more intense editing at newspapers and news websites than they do when when they write books. Book editors tend to be slovenly and blindly profit-oriented. Journalism editors are more concerned with accuracy, because their jobs depend on it; they are blamed for errors. This is famously known among writers. I always got less intense scrutiny and way fewer questions for a 120,000-word book than for a single newspaper column, wherein copy editors (whom I genuinely love) grilled me on whether a cockroach is an arthropod or, more accurately, a “blattodea.”
I was GOING to disclose that, contrary to common right-wing grumping, newspapers don’t assign and write stories to “sell newspapers,” but that is less true today than it was, say, 20 years ago when the facts behind newspaper sales were a big mystery, and you couldn’t accurately correlate sales with content. Sales were constant, whether you were writing about penis size or government mismanagement. Now we know, based on instant online feedback, re clicks. Today, writers are rewarded, and punished, based on reader attention. Stories about variations in penis size are more popular, it turns out, than stories about government mismanagement. This is why penis-size experts make $280,000 a year at newspaper jobs and experts on government mismanagement have to moonlight as bathroom maintenance attendants.
So, that’s today’s challenge. Tell us surprising truths about your line of work — financial or otherwise. Tell only the truth. Funny is good, but so is “holy crap.” As always, this is anonymous unless you don’t want it to be.
Also, I want to disclose today that I have a new doctor with one of the funniest names I have ever heard, and I cannot reveal it. Ever. I have only shared it with three friends. But trust me, it is really funny and if I told you, you would bust a gut. But I cannot tell you.
More journalism disclosures: Journalists, in general, don’t make as much money as you think. Ours is a profession where we get to be famous and talk to important people, and the tradeoff is we’ll do it cheaper, considering our skills, than if we were, say, an accountant at a big firm or an insurance agent. I don’t want to dwell on this, and I am not complaining, but when I left The Post because I shamefully don’t like Indian food, I was barely earning a six-figure income, and I was one of the more highly remunerated writers. Another secret: other than TV talking heads, the highest-paid writers are sports columnists, because they compete with others on a national scale. My good friend Tony Kornheiser will confirm this. Tell him I said hi.
Also, I got a $350,000 advance on “One Day,” but the book took six years to write. Do the math. Subtract the taxes, agent’s fees, depreciation, etc.
My book publisher and editor, David Rosenthal, has authorized me to disclose this figure, but insisted I say that he considers it a bargain, but that he was also drunk when he signed the contract, and then he got fired.
Where should you send your disclosures? Why would you even ask that? It’s always the same place, this handsome orange button.
Also. send me money. I don’t know why I have to keep begging for this. It is $4 a month. That will kill you? At least you are not paid like a journalist.
I worked in public health. The most hair-pulling frustration in the field is that funding is almost always cut from (or never even allocated to) program evaluation. So we spend loads of dollars and lots of years on an intervention and in the end we mostly decide if it worked based on feels. Like buying a lotto ticket and never checking the numbers. Usually these wastes are born of the short-term rewards built into democracy and capitalism, but in the most important cases, like COVID, gun violence, and abortion policy, the ignorance is intentional. We COULD figure these things out, but then someone might lose money or a political position, so nah...
Not on the subject, but I can't get it out of my mind. What is the relevance on most papers you fill in with personal date (excepting wills and perhaps other pertinent legal documents) of asking the question if you are DIVORCED as an option and not just, SINGLE? I have been married and divorced twice and now it is only my business. Was there judgement when it was created as a category or a predictor of actions or health? Every morning when I have my coffee by myself, I feel single.