About Editing and Writing

Barnard Law Collier adds his recollections of editor Harold Evans to the 10/20 post, “My Husband Signed the Contract for Your Book”:

So many things about Sir Harold Evans: His newspaper, magazine, and book editorships. His brilliant friends and authors. His despicable enemies. His awards. The verbosity he has cut from humptynine blathering stories.

What I recall vividly about Sir Harry as an editor—aside from being a bon vivant, raconteur, and dazzling intellect—was one of his offices in New York City. The room was neither fashionable nor elegant (unlike its resident) but it had about 100 square feet of table and desk space, which was topped with tureen-sized bamboo baskets, each labeled with the name of one of his many ongoing projects.

Donna Shalala, elected to Congress last year from Florida, successfully ran three universities before going into politics—she was president of Hunter College, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, and president of the University of Miami.

A Washington insider once told me he thought that more college presidents should be brought into the national government because to succeed as college presidents they had to learn how to balance a variety of competing interests. That, he said, is the way to get things done in Washington.

From a Wall Street Journal column, “Capra Could Cast Jimmy Stewart as Trump,” by Gregg Opelka. a musical theater composer-lyricist.

“He reminds me of the guy in ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” Sen. Kamala Harris said of President Trump in last month’s debate. “When you pull back the curtain, it’s a really small dude.” Mr. Trump’s recent tweet touting his “great and unmatched wisdom” likewise called to mind “Oz the Great and Powerful.” Yet a better comparison might be drawn to the title character in another 1939 classic, Frank Capra’s smart political satire “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. . . .

From the book, My Paper Chase, by Harry Evans. A longtime British editor, Evans moved to the United States in 1984 and edited The Atlantic Monthly Press and then U.S. News & World Report. In 1986 he was the founding editor of  Conde Nast Traveler and from 1990 to 1997 he was publisher of the Random House trade group.

In 1994 we had a submission by a young, first-time writer, not long out of university, whose contract with another house had been withdrawn for failure to deliver on time. Thanks to the alert judgment of a young Random House editor (Henry Ferris) in the Times Books imprint and the superb quality of the writing when I took a look, we judged the book worth an advance of $40,000.

From a column, “How Steam and Chips Remade the World,” by John Steele Gordon in the Wall Street Journal:

Had every computer on earth suddenly stopped working in 1969, the average man would not have noticed anything amiss. Today civilization would collapse in seconds. Nothing more complex than a pencil would work, perhaps not even your toothbrush.

What happened? In 1969 the microprocessor—a computer on a silicon chip—was developed. . . .The first commercial microprocessor—the Intel 4004, introduced in 1971—had 2,250 transistors. Today some microprocessors have a million times as many, making them a million times as powerful but only marginally more expensive.

The headlines in today’s Washington Post A-section were about Trump and war and corruption and impeachment—the newspaper, usually unhappy, was especially angry—but when I took Cruiser, our dog, to a nearby park for his morning walk and we went out onto an open field the sky was as clear and blue as you’ll ever see. The virtues in looking up each morning to see the real world.

Faye Hopkins, a library archivist in Washington, has a new book, “The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washingt0n Newspaper,” and Washington Post columnist John Kelly has a nice story about it. Kelly’s lede:

“For much of its life, the newspaper you are holding in your hands — or perusing on your computer or smartphone—was nowhere near the best one in Washington. It wasn’t The Washington Post that was thick with ads, peppered with datelines from around the world, full of insider gossip, piercing editorial cartoons and the proclamations of officialdom. It was the Washington Evening Star.”

From “The Spring From Which Stories Flow,” about English writer Jack Thorne, by Michael Paulson in the New York Times:

Writing has become a sort of compulsion — a craft that brings him not only joy, but calm. “I find as soon as I start writing other people, I become better,” he said. “It’s that and the sea — those are the two things that sort me out.”

What do writing and ocean swimming have in common? “I think it’s being completely on your own,” he said. “When I’m swimming in the sea, I go way out. And I think writing is quite similar.”

The Washington Post’s Style Invitational is a weekly feature that plays word games. In week 1347, Pat Myers, the empress of the feature, asked for “zingy neologisms and name puns” that answered a question::

Mediochre: Q. The color of the fifth-place ribbon.
Submitted by David Peckersky.

Genghis Cohen: Q. The most fearsome ruler ever to live, except for his mother.
Submitted by Mark Raffman.

Exersighs: Q. What you let out when touching your toes becomes touching your knees.
Submitted by Mark Raffman.

Humortician: Q. That oh-so-helpful comedy expert who analyzes why your joke wasn’t funny.
Submitted by both Neal Starkman and Jeff Contompasis.