WHIFF.(The Talk of the Town)(ideas that have failed)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 10-NOV-03

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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

William Shawn, this magazine's editor absolute for a great many years, used to tell his nonfiction writers that the world's worst subject was the future. Hard to tie down, the future could too easily come loose and take off on unexpected vectors. While he did not in any way wish to intrude on a writer's sovereign franchise to think through ideas that might occur, it would nonetheless, he felt, be best to avoid the future. Reacting to a proposal of mine, he once slightly modified his position, informing me that the future was actually the second-worst subject in the world, the worst being the Loch Ness monster. In the twenty-some years that I submitted ideas to him, he did, as it happened, accept two...

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