About 14 years ago, I wrote a friend back east the kind of letter only a 22 year-old can write. In it, I asked why it had to be that there were no national magazines of the stature of The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books based in – and named after – San Francisco. At 22, I did not fully appreciate the force of history. Its weight.
But the irony may be that while I was arguing for a counterfactual history, the future was being altered with basic HTML. It’s no accident that Craigslist came from San Francisco and not New York City. Has any other publication of the last 20 years had a greater impact on printed media?