Almost fresh out of college and still fairly newly arrived to New York City, I spent the early 1990s working at what I called — when I puffed my chest out a bit — “an assistant editor on the national affairs and foreign affairs desks at Rolling Stone.”
Here’s what I actually did: I answered phones for a couple of the other editors who did the actual editing and assigning. I plotted out, with legal pads and pencils, complicated travel itineraries for our writers and reporters, put through their expenses, made sure they got paid, and — wait, it gets fun soon —s pent a lot of time on the phone with them discussing details of these travels and payments.
Probably the most famous of these writers and reporters were Hunter S. Thompson, the magazine’s legendary National Affairs Editor, and P.J. O’Rourke, it’s Foreign Affairs Desk Chief from the 1980s to 2001. If Hunter…
