Jack Shafer thinks boomer newspaper journalists getting buyouts is a good thing. On the boomer journalist front, my old boss and friend Mike Kinsley has an affectingly candid essay in the New Yorker about mortality, and his increasingly vivid sense of it. It hadn’t occurred to me to see life-span as a part of status anxiety, but now he puts it that way …
I also realized after reading it that it was one of the most thoroughly Godless pieces of journalism I’d read in a long time. It takes a real non-believer to confront death and not even consider eternity. I admire its stoicism, but I cannot really understand it.