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Bronco’s Sacrifice — an excerpt from Acid Test

Yesterday, Nicholas Blackston posted a photo of some of his Marine comrades from Iraq, members of a platoon that had joined Nick’s for a joint night mission. Midway through the mission, the Humvee they were in took a direct hit from an IED. Nick and his crew watched helplessly as the Humvee burned, one of the harrowing experiences that haunted Nick after he returned home from war. I’d never seen the photo before, though the names had stayed with me, indelibly pressed in my mind and heart ever since Nick shared his account with me. This photo, happy, healthy young men who’d heeded the call to serve their country in a moment of camaraderie just weeks or days from disaster, now haunts me. This is the story of their sacrifice, as it appears in Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal

From left to right: Nathan Elrod, the machine gunner; Nicholas Manoukian (Manny), the radio guy ; Luis Blanco, the VC; Clifford Collinsworth, the driver. Photo courtesy of Nick Blackston.

Less than two weeks after the Charlie Company ambush, on October 21, Nick’s Light Horse platoon combined with Bronco platoon for a patrol in the city. They were a mirror image of vehicles and armament traveling in parallel along facing alleys. Bronco was led by Lt. Daniel Moran, the lieutenant Nick had accidentally tripped up back in training, and Lt. Boehlert’s close friend.

Now the two lieutenants shared a joint mission, escorting the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit. The very nature of the EOD was to look for trouble, to roll into the most heavily booby-trapped territory with their thickly armored vehicles, their robots and their bomb suits searching out IEDs to mess with. At night.

Night missions were spooky, but at least Nick could stand up in his turret without feeling like a neon bullseye.  The enemy didn’t have night vision gear, or at least that’s what they’d been told. Nick savored the unaccustomed luxury of  a breeze puffing through his body armor as they rolled into the maze of alleyways. Nick’s Humvee, with Lt. Boehlert aboard, was in the lead going down one alley, and Moran’s Humvee led down the other when the sky ripped apart.

“I remember seeing this huge fireball go in the air,” Nick says. “And my lieutenant said, ‘What was that?” and I said, ‘There’s a huge fireball in the sky,’ and then the only thing I remember coming out of his mouth was, ‘Bronco.’”

Boehlert issued sharp, urgent orders and Seabass whipped the Humvee around the corner and into the parallel alley, approaching from the front.

Bending down and looking through the front window, Nick saw Lieutenant Moran lying on the ground, smoke rising from his body. Another Marine, a guy named Blanco, stumbled toward their Humvee, looking wobbly, as if he’d just been woken from a deep sleep. When Seabass opened the door, they were looking at Bronco’s Humvee immersed in flame. Even from a few car-lengths away, he felt the intense heat from the fire on the exposed skin of his face. The EOD guys were throwing a flame-retardant blanket on the still smoking Lt. Moran and Blanco stood there, looking at them, tottering.

Where were the others? Where they still in there?

Blanco was talking, he was confused, rambling. Then he said, “Take off my glove, bro. It’s hot.”

Blanco held out his hand toward them and Nick and Seabass both looked at it. His glove and his hand were the same thing, a charred, smoking clump; you couldn’t tell where glove ended and flesh began.

“It was just—it looked really bad. And Seabass was real calm, and he said, ‘Man, you need to keep your glove on. Don’t take it off.’ And that’s one of the things they taught us in the training when it comes to burns—don’t remove anything because you’ll take the flesh with it.”

The corpsman came by and took Blanco and Lt. Moran off. Leaving Nick and Seabass watching the vehicle burn, slowly coming to the realization that the two men who had been blown out and badly burned were the lucky ones. Three more guys, the driver Collinsworth, and the radio guy, Manny, and the machine gunner Elrod, were missing and presumably still in there, in that fire.

As they watched it burn, they could see silhouettes through the flames. Nick desperately looked for some way to approach the vehicle to fight the fire and attempt a rescue, but the vehicle started cooking off—all the ammo and explosives began to ignite. Boom. Boom. Boom. The open spot in Nick’s turret faced the fire. He turned it sideways and ducked down just in time, as the rounds from the exploding munitions pinged into the armor surrounding him. Seabass had jumped back in the Humvee and was backing them off to a safer distance.

“Every time there was a moment where we’d think we could go in there and maybe put it out or do something, more rounds would start cooking off, and then the grenades would go off, and then…We ended up having to back our vehicles out and get away from it because that vehicle was a liability. We had to sit there and let our guys burn and just watch it because we couldn’t do anything about it.”

Nick felt bad for his lieutenant, who had to give the order to back off. That had been his best friend lying smoking on the ground, his best friend’s crew burning alive in there, so Nick was impressed with how Boehlert “held his stuff together. He was a pretty good officer. He didn’t show – he stayed very professional, and that had to be hard for him.”

It was hard for all of them.

Nick only knew the men slightly, but he’d gone through training with them, lived in the same barracks with them, gone through the same hell, faced the same dangers. As they waited for an opportunity to approach the vehicle, images raced through Nick’s mind of the men inside.  Collinsworth had been one of those guys always on the offensive. He’d picked on Nick constantly, always giving him a hard time. Nick didn’t like it, but he didn’t take it personally. “That’s just the kind of person he was.”

But that day, when they were getting ready for the mission, out of nowhere Collinsworth had given Nick a big smile and said, “what’s up, faggot?” but in a good-humored way that made Nick smile back.

“I realized that that was his way of actually being nice, seeing that smile. And I remember, in that moment, kind of forgiving him for all the stupid stuff that, you know, just picking on me before. And I had no idea that he’d be leaving.”

“The other guy, Manny—his name was Nicholas as well. His full name was Nicholas Manoukian, but we called him Manny. He was a radio guy. He didn’t even know me, he wasn’t even in my platoon. But whenever I’d be back in the barracks back in the States, training or whatever, anytime guys were joking around with me, just picking on me for the smallest things, he always took up for me. And it always surprised me, because I was just like, ‘I don’t know you’ He was new to our unit, too, and I didn’t go to Fallujah with him or anything, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know this guy, but he’s nice enough to back me up.’ He was just a nice guy. Had a wife and everything, Manny did.”

By then, there was no doubt that that woman and child had lost a husband and father. Manny and Collinsworth had to be dead.

What Nick felt, more than anything, was rage. “We were furious,” Nick said. “You know, any time that they ever got us, it’s just, it’s something that feels like a low blow, you know?”

When the fire and explosions had finally died down — hours had passed— they crept back toward the still-smoking wreckage. As they moved in, a brick wall burst open, a secondary explosion timed by the insurgents to inflict casualties on whoever responded to the first one. Nick was knocked back by the impact, but unhurt. When the dust settled, they couldn’t see Lt. Boehlert, who had been on foot near where the explosion went off.  They tried raising him on the radio, but the answering static mocked them. Then the static broke into violent coughing, followed by Boehlert’s voice, shaky but cogent. “It just kinda rattled his noggin a little bit.”

Ignoring the threat of a tertiary strike, they moved in on what was left of the wall, trying to trace the wires on the secondary explosion to find out where the insurgent who triggered it had been holed up. That led them to a nearby house, but the bomber was long gone. While that was going on, another platoon rogered up on the radio to alert them: there was movement behind the vehicle.

That’s where they found Nathan Elrod, twenty, just a year older than Nick. Elrod was a gunner, too, and like Nick, he’d decided in high school that he wanted to be a Marine. “A good, nice, and caring person,” the sixteen-year-old Elrod had written in an essay on the kind of man he wanted to be. “A U.S. Marine, and a hero.” The impact of the IED blew Elrod out of his turret. He’d been lying in the dirt, minus both legs and part of one arm, for hours. When they got to him, his blood seeping away into the filth of the street, he was conscious and talking. They carried him into the vehicle. He had no idea what had happened to him.

“I can’t, I can’t breathe,” he told them.

And then he died.

Lieutenant Moran and Blanco both survived. Moran suffered 3rd degree burns over 50% of his body, multiple fractures in his back, damage to his lung, a concussion and a crushed spleen. Blanco’s hands and legs and face were all badly burned. Moran would spend three years recovering from his wounds. Both men would be dealing with their injuries, in one way or another, the rest of their lives.

But they would have lives.

That night, Nick’s platoon sat there waiting for the fire to burn out and guarding the wreckage, which had become a tomb. At one point, Nick noticed an Iraqi grilling meat for dinner in his little yard just on the other side of the wall, as if nothing had happened, and he seethed with helpless rage. It wasn’t until after sunrise that they were able to tow the charred hulk away, the Marines remains inseparable from the chassis. As they went, pieces of the wreck fell away.

After that, Nick couldn’t even look at fire. Which was a problem because they had to burn their mail. He just couldn’t do it for days. But he knew he couldn’t go through the rest of his life avoiding the sight of flames, so he took his accumulated letters out to the fire pit and forced himself to watch as the papers curled, then blackened. He just stood there crying, until he felt a hand patting him on his shoulder.

“Everyone understood,” he said.

Hijacking the Runway

Teri with ... Tom Ford, of course. (She really does know EVERYONE.)

I know nothing about fashion, less than nothing (you can ask my wife), but one of my favorite projects in a long time was editing HIJACKING THE RUNWAY: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers , by my client-turned-BFF Teri Agins, fashion columnist (and former fashion industry reporter) for the Wall Street Journal. Teri knows everyone there is to know in the rag trade and has a personality bigger (and far more lovable)  than any runway diva. She can entertain me for hours just chatting on the phone, and that wildly fun, deeply informed and slyly funny vibe is visible on every page of her book, which publishes Oct. 9.

Just read the first pre-pub review  from Kirkus here. It’s right on the money — and fashion is ALL about money.

 

 

 

 

Why Acid Test?

 A word on the title: Yes, Acid Test was what Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters called the famous LSD bacchanals they sponsored in the Bay Area in the 1960s, and, yes, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is the famous and I bet still fun to read book about Kesey and the Pranksters by Tom Wolfe, and yes Acid refers to LSD when much of my Acid Test is about MDMA. So why use Acid Test as the main title? Multiple reasons. First, modern scientific and medical interest in psychedelics as a tool for psychiatric healing clearly began with the accidental discovery of the cognitive effects of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. Second, the the term “acid test” originally referred to a process in which strong acid is used to distinguish gold from base metals. Used in the context of early LSD use, it was meant to imply that in these circumstances the drug could reveal some profound truth. In the context of my book, it suggests the long, absurdly uphill process by which researchers have attempted to determine/prove whether psychedelic therapy is psychiatric gold or toxic lead.

Original poster for a Merry Prankster Acid Test.

 

 

Excerpt from Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy and the Power to Heal:

One of the many who got his hands on a hit of the Sandoz-manufactured LSD, floating free from all the loosely audited experimental trials, was a 30-year-old eccentric, the grandson of a U.S.senator, named Owsley Stanley. His acid experience impressed him as the key to a new, more profound and caring cosmos, and launched Stanley on an historic quest. He hooked up with a Berkeley chem major named Melissa Cargill, and in three weeks at the university library in Berkeley, they taught themselves how to manufacture fantastically pure LSD, which he loosed upon the streets of a growing bohemian enclave in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. Those 3,600 colored capsules passed hand to hand in the spring of 1965 were the first of millions of acid trips he would be directly responsible for.

“I never set out to ‘turn on the world,’ as has been claimed by many,” Owsley told Rolling Stone magazine in a 2007 profile, four years before he died in a car crash. “I just wanted to know the dose and purity of what I took into my own body. Almost before I realized what was happening, the whole affair had gotten completely out of hand. I was riding a magic stallion. A Pegasus.”

One of Owsley’s earliest and most consequential clients was Ken Kesey, who needed a new source of inspiration now that he was no longer picking up spare change and free acid as a guinea pig in the CIA-funded LSD trials in Menlo Park. Unlike the first wave of acid acolytes, Kesey wasn’t an academy-educated intellectual or professional behaviorist. He was a salt of the earth, and he didn’t want to study LSD, he wanted to ride it like a wave. He just happened to bring the rest of the culture with him. Fueled by Owsley product, Kesey and a growing group of rabble-rousing fellow travelers began staging outrageous bacchanal’s called acid tests – a play on the confluence of the drug’s new street name with a process in which strong acid is used to distinguish gold from base metals. The term was meant to imply that the use of LSD in these circumstances could reveal some ultimate truth. Actually, Kesey’s parties mostly revealed what happened when large numbers of random strangers consumed immoderate amounts of psychedelic in wildly uncontrolled circumstances as a tsunami of sound rolled over them from the tolling guitars of the Grateful Dead.
Just as the Kesey-Owsley confederation was electrifying the West Coast, a Harvard professor named Timothy Leary was doing his best to light up the East. Leary, who had begun as just one of the scores of academics studying the fascinating effects of the new drug in clinical trials, became his own best (or worst, depending on perspective) subject. Harvard grew impatient with Leary and his partner in the psychedelic experimentation, another Harvard professor, Richard Alpert, when it got around that the pair had been handing out informal homework to students, in the form of psychoactive chemicals. When both men were eventually dismissed — Alpert for defying an order to surrender his entire psilocybin stash to the university for safe keeping, and Leary for going AWOL from his teaching assignments — a front page editorial in the student-run Harvard Crimson applauded: “Harvard has disassociated itself not only from flagrant dishonesty but also from behavior that is spreading infection throughout the academic community.”
Fine with Leary. He’d concluded from his acid trips that the rules and limitations of conventional society were false fronts, head games designed to control and manipulate. He began to advocate a juiced-up liberation theology based on the psychedelic experience, and he learned to enjoy getting under the skin of the unenlightened. For an academic, he had a surprising knack for attracting attention.

In a 1966 Playboy interview he delivered this gem:
“An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is released under LSD most especially including sexual energy. There is no question that LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man. Compared with sex under LSD, the way you’ve been making love, no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you get from it, is like making love to a department-store-window dummy.”
Between Leary’s hype, Kesey’s beat charm and Owsley’s prowess in the laboratory, psychedelics went viral, creating a drug subculture in which millions of unscreened Americans experimented with drugs of uncertain purity produced by less talented chemists than Owsley.

Hard Love

I now read two-thirds of the books I read using an e-reader app on my phone. I can hold it and flip pages using one hand and carry an entire library in my pocket, which I can pull out at the drop of a long stop light. But I have to say, when my editor sent me this photo of the proof copy of the hardcover of Acid Test, it was love at first sight. In the end, the romance of this folded envelope of fabric-covered board and the stiffly bound sheaf of high quality paper within is enough to make the spirit soar. And note the monogram!

I now read two-thirds of the books I read using an e-reader app on my phone. I can hold it and flip pages using one hand and carry an entire library in my pocket, which I can pull out at the drop of a long stop light. But I have to say, when my editor sent me this photo of the proof copy of the hardcover of Acid Test, it was love at first sight. In the end, the romance of this folded envelope of fabric-covered board and the stiffly bound sheaf of high quality paper within is enough to make the spirit soar. And note the monogram!

Reverse POV

Last year I got a call from a journalist in New Zealand named Charles Anderson who wanted to do something radical: pay me out of his own pocket to edit a multimedia feature he was doing for Fairfax Media on the search for a plane that had been lost for 85 years a la Amelia Earhart. Charles just emailed me to let me know the resulting piece, a glorious use of digital technology to tell a story in multiple dimensions, has just won a big national award for journalistic innovation. But what I found most interesting was a link he sent of an interview he gave describing the process of working with me — a rare glimpse from the other side of an editing project:

When I was working on it, this guy Tom Shroder, who’d edited Gene Weingarten – a Washington Post writer who’d won two Pulitzers – I saw he’d been made redundant and was a gun for hire editing whatever. I thought it would be great to have someone of that calibre edit your work. He said sure. I did it out of my own pocket, but you get to a stage where if you want to be better at something then you want someone to be pretty critical and somebody who’s got experience like that is pretty invaluable.

That was a really interesting editing process, because I had about 6000 words in the final draft to him, and we had about eight back-and-forths and he would just go through the whole thing and have screeds of notes and questions. Everything had to be explained and qualified and it made me realise that the reader isn’t stupid, but they do need to be led along a path and everything has to be easy to understand. It’s a lot easier to read if it’s just effortless because everything makes perfect sense in their minds.

The final draft was 8000 words, so editing wasn’t necessarily cutting down; it was making it more intelligible and readable.

It was nice when it came out, because you want to promote it, and being able to say he edited it gave it some credence in the States. It wasn’t just some hack at the bottom of the world.

 

Read the piece: Charles Anderson is no hack.

 

 

Overwhelmed, and Then Some

The UK cover

After Brigid Schulte published an article in The Washington Post Magazine about her run-in with a time-use expert who told her that in the life she experienced as overwhelmingly hectic, she actually had 30 hours of leisure time a week, I urged her to write a book-length exploration on the subject. We agreed to meet to discuss the idea at an authentic French bistro in downtown DC. It was a lovely summer day and I took my time walking from the Metro stop — both because I wanted to enjoy the warm breeze blowing down G street and because I knew from experience that Brigid, balancing hyper-involvement in the life of her two kids and fanatical devotion to her newspaper reporting, was pretty much always late. Sure enough, I arrived at the restaurant 10 minutes past the appointed hour to find only an empty table. I sat, ate all the bread in the bread basket, waited another 15 minutes, then called her. She was running late she said, just leaving an interview way across town, but she would get to the restaurant as fast as she could.

Fifteen minutes later she called again.

“My car just got totalled,” she said in that hollow voice people get when they are still somewhat in shock. A big van had swerved across several lanes right into her beloved Volvo. She assured me she was physically fine, just shaken up.

We rescheduled, I had the Nicoise salad, a leisurely glass of wine, and left.

That was the inauspicious beginning of what would become a multi-year project into which Brigid plunged so deeply I sometimes wondered if she would ever make it out. Her research took her from Scandinavia to North Dakota and back. Our phone editing sessions were almost always some form of multi-tasking for Brigid. She took my calls on buses, trains, airport jetways and even once in a public bathroom in a Mexican restaurant where she sought refuge from the ambient racket and scribbled notes on a wad of paper towels. All that frenetic labor produced such a massive volume of findings they threatened to overwhelm the engaging narrative of Brigid’s own struggle with the cultural sinks that pulled our lives into chaotic rabbit holes. That would have been a shame, since still trying to manage her family life, her career and writing the book simultaneously, Brigid  was literally living her subject matter. As the Red Queen told Alice:  “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

She had to do more than run. She had to scale a mountain of evidence. But her passion never flagged, and in the end, she managed to put it all together. As Publisher’s Weekly said in a starred review, “her research is thorough and her conclusions fascinating, her personal narrative is charmingly honest, and the stakes are high: the “good life” pays off in ‘sustainable living, healthy populations, happy families, good business, [and] sound economies.'”

It was a pleasure and a privilege working with Brigid and helping the book that comes out next week (March 11) take shape. I never predict books are going to get a tremendous amount of attention, because they almost never do. But I’m making an exception here.

 

 

Drum Roll, Please … What I Really Believe About Reincarnation

OLD SOULS was published 14 years ago now, but rarely does a month pass without someone writing to me to ask if, ultimately, what I saw of Ian Stevenson’s claimed reincarnation cases persuaded me that reincarnation was real. If I had come up with a resounding “yes” answer for that, I have no doubt Old Souls would have sold a million copies rather than 100,000 copies, but, oh well. It just wasn’t that simple. I got another one of those inquiries today, and as I always attempt to answer (as opposed to simply saying, “Read the damn book!”) I figured I should reproduce that answer here, so at the very least I know where to find it, primed to copy and paste, next time I get the same question. Ok, here goes:

 

 

Hi Suresh,

Have you read Old Souls? I think I tried to answer that question. Basically, I do think Stevenson’s cases reasonably establish that at least some, and possibly quite a few of his cases, are NOT explainable by fraud, delusion, self-deception, conspiracy or any other easily conceivable ” normal” cause. But that doesn’t mean the only explanation is reincarnation. The problem with reincarnation as an explanation is we don’t have any truly functional definition of what reincarnation is, much less a theory of a mechanism by which it operates. We don’t have a clear, testable definition of what a “soul” is for example, or any theory about how a personality –consisting of memories, abilities, tendencies, attitudes, identity, etc — could be passed from one body to another. So from a rational, scientific point of view, reincarnation is not really a meaningful concept unless some of those blanks are filled in.  It would make as much sense, and maybe more sense, to say that the explanation for these cases is that all of our existences are in fact illusion, part of a kind of dream, and that what happens in life is actually symbolic, clues pointing to a greater truth of a universal consciousness.
Of course we don’t have any good way to test that theory either.
To me these cases are most valuable for underlining how much of the world is still mysterious and, if not unfathomable, at least unfathomed.
Best,
Tom Shroder

Haliburton’s Guilt Doesn’t Absolve BP

Another Deepwater Horizon aftershock today with Haliburton, the contractor in charge of the cement job that was supposed to keep the Macondo well from blowing out, admitting that it destroyed evidence. As usual with this disaster, it’s very complicated, but the Haliburton admission does NOT mean that BP can now put the blame on its contractor, though that’s what the oil company is hoping to do.

This is from the Times:

“The Justice Department said Halliburton had recommended to BP, the British oil company, before the drilling that the well include 21 metal centralizing collars to stabilize the cementing. BP chose to use six instead. During an internal probe after the accident, Halliburton ordered workers to destroy computer simulations that showed little difference between using six and 21 collars, the government said, after which the company continued to say that BP was neglectful to not follow its advice.”

I’ll attempt to decode.

An oil well is two things: a hole in the ground from the surface to the oil deposit, and a pipe within that hole that acts as a tube through which the oil can flow back up to the surface. You dig a hole, then put a pipe in it, basically. Through the pipe, the oil can be drawn out in a safe, even flow. But if the highly pressurized oil breaks through the walls of the hole itself, it will blast to the surface in an uncontrolled explosion — a blowout. In order to assure this won’t happen, after the pipe is put down the hole, they pump in cement to seal the space between the exterior of the pipe and the well wall.

Centralizers are put in the well to hold the pipe in the middle of the hole. The reason is that if the pipe rubs up against the edge of the hole’s wall, the cement, pumped up from the bottom of the well, won’t be able to flow cleanly around all sides of the pipe, which is what needs to happen to form a good seal.

The Halliburton engineer assigned to the project did tell BP they needed to use 21 centralizers to assure good cement flow in Macondo. BP ignored that, and used only six. This is the  reason some people think the Halliburton simulations indicating that 21 centralizers would have been no better than six — which Halliburton then destroyed — exonerate BP. If the advice BP ignored wasn’t good advice, then they were right to ignore it.

But that’s only a small part of the story. The Halliburton engineer originally told BP that the cement job they planned would fail. He recommended using an entirely different kind of pipe — more expensive and time consuming — to be safe. BP ordered him to go back and make the cheaper kind of pipe work.

That’s when he said, essentially, ok, if you insist, this is what you need to do:

Use 21 centralizers instead of 6.

AND to make sure that worked, perform a special test to determine if the cement flowed evenly around the pipe and didn’t leave any air bubbles or holes.

BP had the testing crew and equipment on board the Deepwater Horizon, but sent them home the  morning of the blowout, without performing the test, to save a few thousand dollars.

 

So to sum up:

BP refused to accept Halliburton’s assessment that the cement job would fail unless they used a more expensive kind of pipe, and ordered the engineer to “make it work” with the cheap pipe.

Then BP ignored both parts of the plan to “make it work.” Even if the 21 centralizers wouldn’t have made a difference, the post-job test would have warned them that the cement had failed, and they could have found a way to fix it.

So though Halliburton acted criminally in destroying evidence, BP is still guilty, guilty, guilty.

 

A Big Ol’ Slushball

A writer named David Cameron did something very clever: He copied a short story published in the New Yorker and sent it out, as a submission with a false name, to assorted and sundry literary journals. They all rejected it. Form letters. Then he submitted it to the New Yorker, which rejected the story they had previously published. Just to be sure, he did it again with another New Yorker story. Same results.

So what do aspiring writers conclude from this little experiment in masochism?

That pursuing publication is a hopeless, thankless, random enterprise in which merit counts for next to nothing?

Gee, now that I say that out loud, it sounds a little too defeatist. Don’t let the bastards get you down. YOUR story will be blessed. It will be so good, that even a system stacked against you will buckle and crumble when exposed to its brilliance.

So Carry On!

But don’t get your hopes up.

 

So You Don’t Think You Need Copy Editors?