Mort’s name brought journalistic integrity, literary sophistication, and money. Donors wanted to be involved with a magazine that would compete with his former employers. It would be a New Economy insurgency. A dot-com entrepreneur provided start-up cash—his site was some kind of cut-rate jewelry retailer, I think—and when his fortune vaporized, a real estate magnate’s nephew stepped in. Now I know how precarious the magazine’s money was, but at the time, it seemed as if anything Mort wanted in New York was just a seductive phone call away.

I remember receiving one of those calls myself. At the time, I was freelancing as a culture writer. I was surprised that Mort called at all, and even more so when the venerable editor lauded my work not only in the New Republic and the Village Voice but also some old pieces for the Seattle Intelligencer, where I’d cut my teeth after college.

“The piece you wrote about the igloo,” he told me over the phone. “That was a breakthrough for you, wasn’t it?”

For a few months, the P-I had run a weekend series of personal memoir pieces. I’d seized the chance to run a little deeper than my usual work, frivolous city-life stuff—Nordstrom execs who played high-stakes Texas hold ’em, Midwestern tourists who came for Sleepless in Seattle–themed weddings—that the editors commissioned in a futile attempt to seem as cool as the Stranger and Seattle Weekly, the city’s alternative papers.

The memoir I wrote about the igloo inspired the best reception of anything I’d contributed to the P-I. Before that, my work profited off my easy generational access to a ’90s attitude my older bosses found mystifying, as if sarcasm were a confusing new technology that only young people could operate. But Mort was right. With the igloo, I dug deeper. Along with a few of my snappier clippings, it’s the piece I sent out when first trying to secure freelance work in New York.

“Thank you, Mr. Brewer.”

“Not to disparage your cultural writing,” he added. “That’s why I’m calling today. I intend to have the best culture file in the country, Whitney. I want you to think about writing for the Bystander.”

It was the first time I heard the name of the new magazine, and it instantly resonated. I attached myself to the word, like a logo.