Love at First Sight
Not until now did we realize that Hillel Levin, the old editor, had been not just liked but beloved. “There was really high esprit de corps at the magazine, which was Hillel’s doing,” said a frequent visitor then and now. “Hillel made it this big team effort. People were really shocked at this guy’s attitude. They felt condescended to.”
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Babcock showed up in mid-April. The June issue was far enough along that he could have ignored it and let it be Levin’s last. Instead, disconcertingly, he made it his first. Babcock is modest about how involved he actually got, but the editors he inherited had the sensation of someone new and supercilious dismantling their handiwork and reconstructing it line by line, picture by picture. They felt their autonomy gone overnight.
“He doesn’t feel that it’s incumbent on him to ingratiate himself with us,” said a name on the masthead. “You can interpret that one of two ways. He’s always like that. Or he doesn’t consider us to be the big time.”
We said we’d heard he had been blue-penciling language that struck him as sexy or profane. “I’m not a prudish person myself,” Babcock responded, “but I still register a small shock when I see certain kinds of profanity in a family magazine.”
In Chicago?
For some reason, “feast” strikes us as seriously off the mark, and not just because it’s so trite. We don’t think of any magazine we like as a feast. Reading gratifies the mind in ways unknown to the stomach. What “feast” promises is something heavy, formal, and bloating.
