Editors of Steel

We get a lot of email. Sometimes it’s from potential writers, sometimes from bill collectors and occasionally from our mothers. But most of it is spam. We get all the usual sorts: penile-enlargement suggestions, ads for “supplements,” press releases and that peculiar new breed, random words thrown together to form meaningless gibberish, occasionally with a viral package included as an attachment.

Now we pride ourselves on being editors of steel, able to make nearly any half-baked article into a perfect piece of prose, pondered the world over. So yesterday we decided to put our money where our red pens are, and see what we could do to make one of those word-jumbles suitable for print. We then, as is our custom, sent the piece back to the original author with suggestions.