Tina Brown

And it's sort of great not to in a way be sort of,

in charge of lots of people either because I don't have to worry, well, what happens if I want that person to advertise or if I want to put that person on the cover?

I can just sort of let rip and it's liberating and I think it's needed actually, you know, because there's so much kind of pussyfooting and mealy-mouthing around that

has been going on in writing, it seems, for the last sort of 10 years, that now you can just really have fun.

And I can have fun anyway, and I'm trying to.

Well, you're absolutely right about the nostalgia.

You know, my book, The Vanity Fair Diaries, which I wrote, you know, seven or eight years ago, people just keep coming up to me and saying, oh, I've been reading it.

It's like the, you know, I feel so nostalgic for that period.

I think it's because...

This was when work was so much fun.

You know, it's like all the fun has come out of work.

Because now, for the journalism media world, it's all about, like, how do you get a platform that anybody will look at?

How do you raise the money for it?

What can you say that, you know, some sponsor doesn't want you to say?

It's like this was a period that I lived through where it was this hell for leather pursuit of...

great stuff, you know, and I had a ball doing it.

And the offices of Vanity Fair were just the HQ of interesting, adventurous talent.

And the same at the New Yorker.

I realize now how terribly lucky I was at the New Yorker to be sitting there with people like Art Spiegelman and Adam Gopnik and David Remnick and Jane Mayer and all these wonderful writers arguing about

what we were going to say in the pieces, you know, whether we wanted to reuse that story, whether it was accurate, whether it was fair, whether it was all these stored things that we talked about were nothing to do with, like, is our business going up in flames?