Tad Friend, once upon a time my colleague at Spy, has written a family memoir called Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor. It’s elegantly written, with many beautiful and touching passages, and the affection for his family really shows through. One very personal reaction it engendered from me was a churlish sort of envy: the sprawling family headquarters in Vermont and Long Island, the timely five and six figure inheritances. Well, good for him. It will not surprise you that my favorite passage, which I’ll quote here at length, was about his days at Spy in 1986 and 1987. “I was crazy about working at Spy as a writer and then a senior editor; it was thrilling to be part of a young underpaid underclass and throwing spitballs at the city’s old overpaid overclass. We spent our days together in laughter, nights discussing stories and headlines we could never do–“The Yellow Peril,” say, about moguls and their Asian wives–over rounds of stingers ordered up by the co-editors, Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, old friends from Time. “More hooker drinks!” Kurt would call. and Graydon would cry “Drink up, Taderino!”’ Later, Tad 
prevaricates a bit. “But I was beginning to wonder about our targets. The first three people I profiled at the editors’ suggestion, an intellectual [Edward Schossberg], a judge, and a tycoon, were all Jewish. We weren’t pillorying them for their religion, but for their hypocrisy, megalomania, stupidity, cupidity, vulgarity, pretention, sexual peccadilloes, and self-glorifying excess: all satire’s usual pinatas. But we didn’t know what we ddn’t know. . . .At one of Spy‘s many parties, a friend who wrote for the magazine, Melik Kaylan, issued a challenge: “Tad, for God’s sake, say something controversial about someone powerful.”’
