The real thing

After editing the late John Leonard for sixty-nine months, during which despite regular chemotherapy he never missed a deadline, Jennifer Szalai of Harper's magazine looks back to their first month working together (subscription required):

I had the young editor's tendency to err on the far side of caution. My queries to John weren't many, but their phrasing was that of someone who had never met a hair she wouldn't wplit yet was shy about wielding the knife. I recently opened up the Microsoft Word document on which we did most of our edits for that [first] column, last saved at 8:22 P.M. on February 11, 2003, and I saw a bold-faced query of mine after John's reference to "a techno-rave, ZyloFlex body armor, and some stun-gun sex." I had bolded "stun-gun sex" and added, "John: Just to clarify: Is 'stun-gun' meant metaphorically here?"

No, it most emphatically wasn't.

Comments

[reader]

the answer is, 'Cosmopolis', by Don DeLillo