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By Root 530 0

win. For the past two years, I had been with these lawyers when they were beat up, gassed, arrested, and ignored by the United States, Musharraf, and Zardari. A lawyer friend pulled me inside the former chief justice’s house. Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry sat in an armchair in a corner of his living room, greeting an endless line of well-wishers. In another room, lawyers crowded around a TV, waiting for the prime minister’s speech. I walked outside. People shouted, “Go, Zardari, go!” Small groups of lawyers, in their uniforms of black suits and white shirts, danced and sang.

At daybreak the prime minister finally announced that the judges would be restored. Within days they were, setting up an inevitable showdown between the bench and Zardari. I had a feeling that Zardari’s former criminal charges, ranging from corruption to murder, would eventually come back to haunt him. I also had a feeling, lingering in the back of my head, that Chaudhry’s megalomania could eventually approach that of Musharraf. But I shook it off. Must have been the lack of sleep.

My request for an actual vacation that month had been ignored, and back in Chicago, it seemed like everything was being ignored. Conference calls were scheduled; rumors flew that would put Pakistan to shame. We received new directions every day. New story formats were developed—we were supposed to file information for “charticles,” we were supposed to write new “brights” for the front page. The man in charge of innovation for the company sent subversive “think pieces,” stream-of-consciousness rants with random capital letters, confessions like “I’ve been on a continual road trip” and misspellings like “NOTOCABLE,” “INSINCERETY,” and “VISABLE.” One example of a “think piece”: “Check these out. They reflect exactly the kind of POWER that subtle and cerebral can deliver … It oozes timeless, all demographic QUALITY.” I said yes to everything, happy to be of service, sifting through management “think pieces,” trying to find the hidden messages in the capital letters, to figure out why on earth people who flaunted their inability to spell, capitalize, and punctuate would want to run a media company.

Finally, on a Monday night, my boss called just as I walked in the front door.

“Kim, they made a decision, and some tough decisions had to be made,” he told me. “And as part of those decisions, they would like you to come home and work for the metro desk.”

Ultimate Fight Challenge was done. I hung up the phone and burst into tears. The next day, during the requisite conference call, the paper’s editor informed me that the company was unifying the foreign reporting team to serve everybody, which meant “more strategic company-wide use of our expertise.” He used words like “partnership” and phrases like “a big chessboard.” I felt like we were breaking up. All told, thirteen—or maybe sixteen—correspondents survived from both newspapers, including only two from the Tribune, which had once had eleven. (The numbers were unclear, because the company also kept a few Los Angeles Times correspondents on contract.)

“There’s no right or wrong choice,” said the big boss, adding that he thought I could use my expertise covering the war on terror in Chicago. The gangs must have really stepped up their game.

I could hardly blame the company—it was, after all, bankrupt, and foreign news cost a lot of money. My bureau cost about $120,000 a year in expenses alone. The Tribune foreign desk was essentially eliminated, almost quietly, just as the newsroom loudly promoted a class for “Advanced Twitter.” The Los Angeles Times would run the company-wide foreign desk, and the new foreign editor would be the same man who had written the competing Los Angeles Times story on Afghan Star, the one that had run the same day as mine and put me squarely in Sam Zell’s crosshairs. Curses—my nemesis. I felt sad and numb and rejected, almost like a spurned lover, but this rejection felt even more personal. I loved this job, I was this job. If I didn’t have this, what would I be?

I was given time to think about the metro