Everyone needs a good editor, even the prez:
wait, I forget: is Dumpster politics capitalized or not?
Photo from the White House as posted on Flickr. Official description:
President Barack Obama and Jon Favreau, head speechwriter, edit a speech on health care in the Oval Office, Sept. 9, 2009, in preparation for the president’s address to a joint session of Congress. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Copy editing: it’s what separates us from the animals people. Don’t be scared of it.
From the recent excursion to the Score! free swap at BKLYN Yard, I encountered, in the space of an hour:
Patrick, an editor at Birkhauser (a publisher of books and journals)
Erin, an editor at Lemondrop.com
Kristin, an editor for Real Simple magazine
Jessica, an associate editor at (“pleasepleaseplease don’t put where I work!”) Magazine
All were people I interviewed for that post on Brokelyn. And all were combing through the vast and ever expanding sea of free crap on the edge of the Gowanus.
I’ve been trying to divine whether there’s a deeper meaning to this, but I’m not sure if there is one, except maybe that everyone, from the lowly unpaid blogger to the fully employed magazine editor, appreciates the sweet offer of free, gently used goods on a sunny summer day.
The event also had a surprising dearth of homeless people, who you would figure would have been lining up at the door to pick up discarded French art prints and record players that may or may not work (and maybe some clothes) in exchange for their unused … whatevers. They must not have known about it. I mean, don’t they read the internet? How do they update their Facebook statuses? How will their friends ever know which “Martin” character they are?
Even more so than editorship, 100 percent of people I talked to shared one common trait: they all had Gmail addresses. And the meaning of that is clear: 20-somethings in Brooklyn are at least as cool as my 70-year-old grandmother.
Inverted Soapbox 