Last note on all this New Yorker brouhaha: Although a few people wrote that I was a fool and/or a whiner, most of the responses were positive.  The Death Star itself has been officially silent, though I did get an email from one New Yorker writer whom I’d never met, on the deep QT, who said that some editors were indignant. Oh, well.

The best response came from a 28-year-old freelance journalist, who wrote:

“It seems to me, one of those young journalists, that there's a classic case of hypocrisy between the preaching and the practice in our profession --- never trust a politician, but your editor, on the other hand... 

And for what it's worth, I've been a freelancer my whole career, which is about 15 years shorter than yours, but I find that the mightily focused self-direction I need to land assignments and pay my bills doesn't always lend itself well to inside-institution team playing.  It might be letting myself off the hook too much to think that freelancing has its own institutional culture, and it can be hard to make a life of that compatible with a new institutional culture, esp. when the institution gives you so little incentive to do so.”

As Hyman Roth says in Godfather II: This is the business we’ve chosen.