That Hurts

NYT's Alan Feuer, who wrote this one on the recent plane crash, takes his lumps: T.R. looked at his screen.

What was there? A crash. A fire. A dead man. A dead body. Two dead bodies. One and a half, anyway--that's what the Post would write. They were sensationalists over at the Post. They would take a fact like half a body lying there and print it, the fact, in the paper. Sensation and vulgarity, with all those facts.

T.R. had a higher calling. He looked at the keyboard. He looked at his hands. He looked at the screen, with his byline there. Why did his byline look like that? The puny single L in the first name, the soupy string of vowels in the last. Sometimes, in his heart, T.R. wished for a tougher byline.

Like Michael Brick. There was a byline. You could throw a byline like that at a person's head, the hard fricatives cracking the skull. If that were T.R.'s name, he might go all the way with it, make it "Mike Brick." Maybe that would be too much.