One piece led to a serious argument at the office, and Lane Porter found himself in the middle. Richard Calvin, a writer with decades of experience covering the Middle East for the New York Times, had composed a story about the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It revealed embarrassing new details about Bin Laden’s escape at Tora Bora in the mountains of Afghanistan, when he’d slipped beyond the military’s reach into Pakistan’s tribal area. The Calvin piece presented a devastating slapstick farce of American incompetence. We all loved it.

But it didn’t make it past Lane’s fact-check. He argued that the number of unnamed sources was simply too high to tolerate in such an incendiary story. A tense meeting between Lane, Calvin and Mort was convened, and after deliberating overnight, Mort pulled the piece from the issue.

“I agree with fact-check,” he told his writer. “You don’t have the story, Rich.”

And so, all through closing, we dealt with Calvin’s brooding. If you happened to stray off from the group, you’d suddenly find yourself in his hulking shadow, berated by his version of events.

“An attack on my integrity would be one thing,” he said, “but a lot of good people risked their asses to get me this information, and now some little prick from a fashion rag”—he meant Vanity Fair—“wants to school me on the nature of facts. When the New Yorker runs the same story, Mort’s going to look like a total asshole.”

I felt bad for Lane. He was only doing his job, preserving the magazine from lawsuits it couldn’t afford. But everyone respected Calvin’s work as a foreign correspondent, especially in the aftermath of the Daniel Pearl tragedy, and no one except Mort stood up for Lane. The fact-checker just hunched there with his headphones, hiding behind his row of action figures, working through another story.

So I was impressed when he came out drinking with the rest of the staff after closing. Mort always took us to Englander’s, a stodgy old pub that made us feel like real Fleet Street hacks. It was the only time you’d catch Mort out of the office. He’d drink exactly one pint of Guinness, regale us with stories from when editors wore green eyeshades, and then quietly go home to his wife, leaving the tab open.

The staff quickly divided up, with Mort, Calvin, and a few political writers in a red leather booth, the rest of us mingling at the bar. Even the 9/11 issue had resulted in a more festive closing party than this one. The writers in Mort’s booth spoke low like conspirators, never laughing. They were intent on stopping Bush, and had worked themselves into believing the issue could help achieve it.