Our Favorite Lead

'The offices of the National Mirror were situated, in 1965, a few blocks down Fifth Avenue from the Flatiron Building. The Mirror was one of several imitation magazines and newspapers in a chain known as Countrywide Publications. They were imitations in the sense that their names and cover layouts closely resembled those of other, better known and more popular publications. Countrywide's guiding strategy was to try to confuse a distracted and overstimulated public into buying its periodicals by mistatke. The lord of this empire of the ersatz was a man we called Fast Myron. Myron had many such replicant outifts in the Countrywide family, ringer scholock magazines whose names were bogus household words. As an admirer once put it, "If Myron wanted to make a magazine like Harper's, he would call it Shmarper's''

--from a piece in the October 16th New Yorker, by novelist Robert Stone. You can read about earlier favorite leads here. And you can read an interview with Robert Stone here.