In the days immediately after the attacks, it had been all hands on deck at the magazine to cover the only story that mattered. With bridges and tunnels closed, we needed everyone on the streets reporting, including me, a culture writer. At first I panicked at the thought of asking people to describe what they’d seen, who was missing. I hadn’t done much hard reporting since my early days in Seattle. But once I entered the stream of events, I felt this other energy. The world around me crackled, true stories were everywhere. There was always someone rousing from their daze with a fresh account, using the presence of a journalist to reconstruct the catastrophe, pin it down with words. The pit still steaming downtown, I was a witness to history unadulterated.

I never got started with alcohol when I still had reading and writing to do, but Eastham poured more wine for himself and said, “Maybe a book like Rogue Winter has to be sacrificed for the Towers to be redeemed.”

I squinted at his overreach, but this is what people were capable of in their ill-fitting new sincerity. I understood the need to get serious. Ever since reporting on the attacks, I felt it every day at the Bystander. I wanted to get out of the culture file, into the rush.

“Please,” Eastham added, with a frightened glance at the recorder, “don’t print that.”

—

I went to the Bystander office in Chelsea to transcribe the tape and type up my notes. The freight elevator opened, and though it was late, I saw my colleagues still working to put the issue to bed before the winter holidays.

I greeted Ross Briggs, back from covering Enron in Houston, and Ben Hassan, making a rare cameo from his usual perch in Washington. I checked the window of Mort Brewer’s office and, as always, our editor was there, phone clenched between ear and shoulder, scribbling on a yellow legal pad.

In 1998, I first heard a rumor that Mort Brewer was leaving Harper’s to form a monthly magazine. He started giving interviews about the conglomerated state of media, singling out Rupert Murdoch’s greasy empire but not sparing Hearst and Condé Nast’s fine feelings. The media ecosystem was increasingly homogeneous, he said. It was time for a new, totally independent magazine.

He may have been on the back end of his career, but people listened to Mort. He’d trained half the journalists in New York at Columbia and given countless others their breaks, first at the Nation and later at Harper’s. His reputation was spotless. It was said he’d thrown Bob Bartley from the Wall Street Journal down a set of stairs at a party in the ’80s.