David Simon Essay In Esquire

I've blabbed enough about The Wire being the greatest TV show ever made, so go rent season one already. Season five weaves in the newspaper business, and show creator David Simon has an essay in the March issue of Esquire about his days as a newspaper reporter. (It says it's a preview, but from what I can tell it the complete essay is online.)

The part that grabbed me:

For me, the religion was in the chase, the pursuit of accumulated fact and quote, the rush to deadline, and the arrogance of standing up like the village griot at the campfire and running down a story that hadn’t yet been heard. And then the next day, maybe, doing it again.

For that alone, I can have no regrets. Nah, son, fuck law school. And fuck the M.B.A. I’ll never have. And fuck all that Chaucer and Cervantes and Proust I might never get around to reading. On a given day, I learn something that you didn’t know and then, my authority drawn only from scrawl on pages of a pocket notebook, I write it up clean so the rest of you can get your hands filthy with ink, reading my righteous shit. In the less fevered lobes of my brain, it was as pure as that. I swear it was.