But then, Adam shouldn’t have had the thoughts he shared with Stanley. Anyone in the Room who’d had a peephole on their conversations all these years would have been flabbergasted at the Adam who sat in these pews. Thinking of it reminded Stanley of the surprise—for a completely opposite reason—at the foul-mouthed Cabinet of the Watergate tapes. The president, who in public said he spoke for the silent majority, spoke in private like a longshoreman, the figure most of the silent majority had climbed out of their family histories to leave behind. Although Don proved the president a crook, it was the way the commander in chief talked that made him sound like a crook. If he had been just a little more baffled and evil than nasty and evil, he could have been forgiven. Or perhaps Stanley could have absolved him. What had his mother taught him? It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

Adam was nervous in these pews. His anxieties were a betrayal of an idea of newspapering that had—until the Internet began stealing readers from the print edition, whose advertising made profits—prospered. Adam knew he could not appear in public as he did at church with Stanley. The newspaper was authoritative. The executive editor was the exemplar of this impossible fiction, a fantasy that was dissolving into gossamer and dust with each reportorial scandal, every blogging tiddlybit, each of the millions upon millions of disaffected subscribers busy with the abandon of leaving the world to others.

“The obvious thing to think is, she’s not qualified,” Adam said. “She’s not. Not qualified at all.”

“If qualified is what you want,” Stanley offered.

“Exactly. Do we want that?”

“In the past, you always did.”

“That’s just it. The past is no good, don’t you see?”

Stanley objected to this. But he said nothing.

Adam took Stanley’s silence for assent and continued, “Change. I’m looking for change. More couldn’t possibly be at stake at a time when fewer and fewer readers are turning to us.”

“In the paper,” Stanley reminded him. “Online, we have more readers than we ever did.” Adam constantly forgot this, possibly because advertising dollars online hadn’t yet caught up with readership online. It distressed managers. You couldn’t get advertisers to pay top money for online ads, the way they’d always paid for display ads in newsprint. Stanley had tried to convince Adam to mount a public-service campaign on the subject. Let’s talk about advertisers’ obligations to democracy. “Democracy” was one of Adam’s sweet words. It got him going. But he’d rejected the campaign idea as self-serving.

“We focus our resources on accountability reporting,” Adam was saying. Stanley realized he hadn’t been listening very well.

“The paper’s also a place where you can be different and quirky,” Adam continued.