The Subprimes by Karl Taro Greenfeld

Sports Illustrated , secured contracts at profligate start-ups and the relaunched Bloomberg Businessweek . I turned one of my early articles into a popular book, What You Wish For , about a small town in Pennsylvania that became environmentally devastated, but wealthy, through fracking, and was then destroyed by petty infighting and alcoholism, like a village of drunken lottery winners. I’ve done nothing of comparable quality or success since, but editors and content curators still recognize my name. I’m a hack, but at least hackery supports my family, or has supported us. Amid the great prairie fire of media failure, Ihave thrived. Though I owe everyone stories. I am perpetually behind, and falling further.
    Lawsuits were the best thing ever to happen to my career. No magazine wants to fire a writer who is a codefendant in a multimillion-dollar libel suit. So the great empire of Bloomberg and I are still in business, only because their lawyers don’t want to risk turning me against the company. I remain on the draw, a modest sum sloshing into my bank account every month as my latest lawsuit trudges its way through the courts.
    My editor at Bloomberg calls, a smart man, Rajiv, who is second in command.
    â€œLarry Ellison,” he says.
    This is what editors do. They call me up and say a name.
    I sometimes say one back.
    â€œSean Parker.”
    He seems to think about this and then says:
    â€œAndrew Mason.”
    I don’t know who that is, so I Google him. I quickly come up with a reply.
    â€œReed Hastings.”
    That seems to have satisfied him.
    â€œLet me think about that and get back to you.”
    I can picture him on the third floor of the Bloomberg building, sitting behind his terminal, which I am sure he doesn’t know how to operate.
    I decide to have a little fun with him and ask for a bond quote, which, if he actually knew how to use the terminal, would be easy.
    â€œHey,” I say to Rajiv, “can you tell me what GE ’28 five and halfs are trading at?”
    â€œFuck you,” he says. “Hey, stop getting sued, okay?”
    He hangs up.
    I am about to open up an e-mail from Bloomberg’s lawyer, who recently, and correctly, deduced that the story on the Texas mega-preacher Pastor Roger, whose chapel is a converted football stadium, was so poorly reported that to call it a fabrication would be giving me too much credit. I had indeed made a key error in claiming that Pastor Roger participated in a college danceathon in support of Planned Parenthood while he was at Oral Roberts. But there was so much else wrong with my story, the preacher’s age, wife’s name, number of children, grad school, and so forth, that it would be hard for him to claim malice or libelous intent. Because I got EVERYTHING wrong. The lawyer, Ed Minskoff, was delighted when he discovered just how badly I had fucked up.
    â€œStupidity is a defense,” he said in a conference call that included many of Bloomberg’s top brass.
    â€œYou just have to be you” was how Rajiv paraphrased the defense strategy, should I be called to testify.
    The lawyer sends out weekly updates as to the progress of the case. Pastor Roger, who among other things scoffed at the notion of global warming and climate change and government regulation to ensure clean drinking water and E. coli –free produce, was on television just yesterday claiming again that there was still so much space in the United States that every family in America could have a five-bedroom home with a three-car garage and a backyard and that wouldn’t even fill up Texas! In his sermons he insists that God gave us oil and gas and land and grain, the animals, the plants, “the rocks, the dust, the oceans, the sky, it’s all ours! And that doesn’t mean just that part of the Earth the federal government says is our ‘dominion,’ that means ALL of the Earth.”
    And I had made the mistake of saying he