MY first real job in journalism was as a junior editor at Esquire, a magazine with a venerable literary pedigree. I imagined myself having three-martini lunches with Tom Wolfe, and explaining to “Tom” (surely we would be on a first-name basis by the third martini) that his latest 25,000-word article was not bad, exactly, but needed another run through the typewriter before we could even think of publishing it.