“With magazines, it’s also complicated. Either you work for big bucks for Conde Nast and have them completely rewrite everything you turn in, or you work for less remunerative venues where, in the last few years, 1500 words have come to be considered a feature article. To me that’s a caption. And even if you have a good editor, they have people pushing in on them, demanding last minute cuts so some designer can jerk himself off giving pages his special sparkle, with lots of white space, and sometimes even the good editors feel they have to edit these micropieces to death. Take your voice right out of the equation, suggest little word changes, strike out sentences, until you no longer have any idea why you bothered to write the thing in the first place, since any entry-level job slinging burgers at McDonald’s would be more remunerative, if you factor up the time you spend making beetling little changes to what was perfectly all right in the first place.” – Gary Indiana, “The Five Percent Paradox”