Word: kinsley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Sometimes I think of myself as a kind of lesser Michael Kinsley. For years he was the fiery voice of TV liberalism on Crossfire; during the same period I battled bravely against my quick-witted and Republican mother-in-law. While Kinsley and I both contribute to this magazine, he tends to get a full page or more, while I get a modest two columns. And when he left old media to go to Microsoft, where he founded Slate, an online magazine www.slate.com that transmitted its first bits seven months ago, pundits everywhere interpreted the event as a sign that...
...might think this makes me bitter, playing digital Salieri to Kinsley's Mozart. But I am a realist. I need Kinsley the same way a coal miner needs his canary. Which is to say, if I see him topple from his perch as an online publisher, I'm dashing for the exit. That's part of the reason I made a point of meeting him for dinner the last time I visited Seattle. I was worried...
...concern had nothing to do with the way Kinsley appeared to be flirting with doom by regularly needling his boss in his "readme" column. ("Have it killed," Bill Gates orders Kinsley in a recent column. "You mean, 'Have him killed,'" Kinsley replies, referring to the author of a Slate article. "No, you fools," Gates shrieks. "Kill the piece! Kill the piece!") I suspect such stuff is seen at Microsoft headquarters as a necessary evil, a way for Kinsley to demonstrate Slate's independence...
...true source of my angst was the apostasy that Kinsley has long threatened and was at last poised to commit. Come February, Slate would cease being like nearly everything else on the Net: free. Slate devotees who wanted to keep reading its weekly mix of news and political commentary would be charged $19.95 a year...
...really going to make people pay?" I blurted, some might say hysterically, as Kinsley sat down at a waterfront restaurant...