Front of Book

Voice people got in each other’s faces a lot. There was a lot of arguments. Yelling fits. There were feuds that went on and people didn’t talk to each other. It kept things bustling. I took that like that’s the way it worked everywhere, but then when I eventually went to other magazines, I was like, “Wow, everyone is being so cordial and polite.” It wasn’t that people were rude at the Voice, they were just much more direct and much more likely to say what’s off the top of their head. When I went to magazines, everyone was a lot more cautious about what they said. It prepared me for the blog world because a lot of it made me feel like, “Oh, I’ve been through this before.” I knew writers who hadn’t been through the Voice experience, and when they went online and went through a [onslaught] of hostility.

Q&A: James Wolcott on Lucking Out’s New York City, “Bloomberg’s City,” and TV and Internet Culture