The dark side

Reader comment, hacks and flacks, and Mark Twain. Also, 7 other things worth your time.

There is a lot of news going on in the world right now: Covid-19 resurgence, for one, much as I wish it weren’t still so key. We’ll get to it all below.

But first, a reader signed up for the reader advisory group this week. And she joked that she’d been a journalist, but she’d now gone over to “the dark side”—marketing and public relations.

Now, for the record, I don’t think of it that way. And, I say this as someone who gets dozens of pitches from PR and marketing people every single day. They have their job to do, and I have mine.

But, it’s a common self-depracating joke among writers.

And, it provides a chance today for me to explore a story I was thinking about recently — probably my favorite example of someone who went back and forth between these kinds of vocations many times (journalism, “real” writing, and marketing).

It’s the story of Samuel Clemens, a/k/a Mark Twain, and his key influence on the Personal Memoirs of Ulyssess S. Grant, which were published 135 years ago this sum…