Travel Blog

"Thank ya, ma'am," my friend Alan said to the waitress at Big City Tavern who brought him his soup. A long-time New Yorker, Alan grew up in New Orleans, and humidity and palm trees bring out his Southern manners. I reminded him he was not in the South; he was in South Florida.

Over lunch, we talked about writing. Alan had freelanced for me for nearly two decades. He said that editors now all want short articles, and he pointed out the irony of that, in the age of the Internet, which had made space a nonfactor. After centuries of having a finite space in which to place words, we now had a system in which words could go on and on. And publishing's response to that was to severely limit their number.