The pages of proofs were piled at my feet. Bourbon had been poured. We were putting to bed our biggest issue of the year—double the size of a normal book on top of having to deal with a deadline a full day early . . . and an art director who was forced to miss almost the entire production cycle because his second baby arrived two weeks ahead of schedule. We were changing the orientation of a page, and one of our fearless designers, in an attempt to address the fallout of a much-tweaked layout, asked me what the last two words happened to be on the proof I held in my hand; she wanted to triple-check that all the shifting hadn’t knocked us off course.
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“Exhaustively explore,” I mumbled, in a hurry to get past the proofing process so I could finally run off and write the intro to the Best of Chicago issue that I should have written on Sunday night or Saturday afternoon or any time that wasn’t 9:26 PM on Monday, the day we went to press.
With a staff so devoted to seeking out the great and important things bubbling up to (or just below) Chicago’s surface, it was bound to happen that a little overlap would occur. It wasn’t until I read Asher Klein’s account of the Best Reappropriator of Hip-Hop on Etsy in our Goods & Services section that I realized the same winner, Meaghan “Moneyworth” Garvey, had been christened Best Rap DJ and Hip-Hop Illuminati Conspiracy Theorist over in Music & Nightlife. Talk about exhaustive. We even pushed ourselves to find the few matters on which one writer’s research (Sam Worley’s) clashes with another’s (Mike Sula’s), hence Best Appetizer on Which Reasonable Critics Can Disagree.
