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by Scott Meadow | Editor & Publisher, IRREVERENT Magazine
THE EDITOR'S DESK — I don't know if Kharla is actually banned from Milan. I have read her piece from FAT Toronto — "I Am in Toronto Because I Cannot Legally Return to Milan Yet" — and I have stared at the phrase "legally return" for longer than I would care to admit. Is there a warrant? A restraining order? An incident with prosecco and a security guard named Marco that has been codified into municipal law? Kharla will not say. Kharla says, "You know how it is," and then changes the subject to a Balenciaga show from 2019 that she insists was "actually about grief."
The truth is, no, I don't know how it is. I don't know how any of this is. But I do know that Milan Menswear Summer/Spring 2027 opens on June 19th, and I do know that Kharla is my Fashion Director, and I do know that no one else on this staff can correctly identify a lapel width without making a joke about it.
So I approved the trip.
The Decision
The approval came through at 11:47 p.m. on a Monday, because that is when editorial decisions happen at this magazine: late, slightly drunk, and with the kind of confidence that only comes from having already made so many bad choices that one more feels statistically inevitable.
Kharla's request was not elaborate. She sent a text: "Milan. June. Marco says hi." I stared at this for several minutes. Marco, as far as I can determine, is either a former lover, a current creditor, or a minor functionary in the Italian fashion industry who once helped Kharla escape a showroom through a window. Kharla has mentioned Marco in three published pieces, two expense reports, and one police-adjacent incident that I am legally prevented from describing in detail.
I approved the expense report. I approved the travel. I did not ask about Marco. This is management, I have learned: the strategic deployment of willful ignorance.
The Context
We are a small satirical magazine. We have seven writers, a CMS that I recently migrated for "stability" (a word that now haunts me), and an editorial philosophy I can best summarize as: If it's funny and not actively criminal, we print it.
This philosophy has consequences.
Bradley Snipes, our Entertainment Correspondent, is currently homeless in L.A. He lost his passport at a Eurovision afterparty or at the custom's desk and has since filed three dispatches from something called "a sound bowl circle." I have yet to approve all three. The last one contained a meditation on the geopolitical implications of wind chimes, and it made me laugh at 2 a.m.
Sam Turge, our Political Correspondent, is filing from Room 614 of a mid-tier Manhattan hotel that he has slowly convinced himself is the Watergate for reasons I can't (won't) understand. He refers to the minibar as "the evidence locker." His last piece on Tulsi Gabbard's resignation contained a two-paragraph digression on the minibar, and it was the best political writing I have read this year.
Julian Cross reviewed a Brooklyn omakase restaurant while actively dismissing a CDC raw fish warning, and the piece was so good that the restaurant had to hire bouncers. Madison Garcia unboxed a smart-toilet at CES and the podcast it apparently started about her butt I will not search for. Tuck Chimes wrote 2,000 words on Nebraska's teen social media ID law and framed it as Schumpeterian economics, and he was — I am still not sure about this — completely sincere.
And Kharla — Kharla, who insists she is 29 despite having covered fashion weeks since 2007 — is legally barred from Milan, and I have just approved her flight.
The Justification
The easy answer is that I am a bad manager. This may be true. I have never taken a management course. My qualifications for running this magazine consist of: having read a lot of magazines, having written for several that folded, and having, at age something, inherited a small amount of money that I immediately spent on a domain name and a writer who turned out to be Kharla.
The harder answer is that there is a difference between responsible publishing and memorable journalism, and I have chosen, every time, to privilege the latter. Not because I am brave. Not because I am reckless. But because I have read enough "responsible" journalism to know that it is often forgettable, and I have read enough irresponsible journalism to know that it is often the only thing that makes us feel something.
Kharla in Milan is a risk. She may be detained. She may be deported. She may have another incident with Marco that I will learn about via text message at 3 a.m., accompanied by a photo of a prosecco bottle and no further explanation.
But she will also file a dispatch that no other magazine would publish. She will describe a menswear show with the kind of catty, melancholic, self-aggrandizing precision that makes our readers — who are smarter than I usually give them credit for — feel like they have seen something true.
That is the trade. That has always been the trade.
The Fallout
I have not told Kharla about this column. She will read it when it publishes, and she will text me within minutes. The text will say something like: "You make me sound insane. I love it. Marco says you're brave."
And I will not ask which Marco she means, because there may be more than one, and because I have learned that some questions are better left unasked when you are running a magazine that operates on the knife-edge of chaos.
Our legal counsel — a patient man named David who I pay monthly and who sends me emails with subject lines like "Re: The Kharla Situation (Again)" — has suggested that I include a disclaimer. So here it is: IRREVERENT Magazine does not condone illegal activity. We do, however, condone journalism that requires its practitioners to occupy legal gray zones, provided that the resulting prose meets our editorial standards, which are high, arbitrary, and enforced by me, at 11:47 p.m., with a glass of something I should not be drinking on a Tuesday.
Kharla flies to Milan on June 18th. The show opens on the 19th. I will be at my desk, refreshing the CMS, waiting for her dispatch, and wondering — as I always wonder — whether this is the piece that finally gets us sued, or gets her detained, or gets me that email from David with the subject line "We Need to Talk."
Probably all three. Probably before the espresso.
But until then: the coverage is approved. The expense report is signed. And my Fashion Director, who cannot legally return to Milan, is going back to Milan, because the menswear is non-negotiable and the prose is worth more than the risk.
This is what leadership looks like at IRREVERENT. It looks like insomnia. It looks like bad decisions made for good reasons. And it looks, if I am being completely honest, a little bit like love.
Il Secondo.
Scott Meadow is the Editor & Publisher of IRREVERENT Magazine. He recently migrated the CMS. He regrets this.
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by Scott Meadow | Editor-in-chief, IRREVERENT Magazine
Monday mornings begin the same way they have for the better part of two decades: I open the submissions folder before I open anything else, including my eyes fully. There are usually forty-three emails. Forty of them are pitches. The other three are from someone named Gary who has been trying to sell me a timeshare since 2019 and whose commitment to the bit, I'll admit, I respect.
The pitches are the problem. Not because they're bad — some of them are quite good — but because by the third coffee, I can no longer tell which ones I'm reading from the submissions folder and which ones I accidentally opened from Reuters.
This is not a metaphor. This is my Monday morning.
Let me give you some examples, because the abstract version sounds like the complaint of a man who drinks too much and has opinions about it. The specific version sounds like that too, but at least it's useful.
Case One. A writer — good writer, has been with us since the last redesign — pitched a piece about a legacy Fortune 500 company launching a cologne for men "who want to smell like quarterly earnings and quiet dominance." The subhead was something like: *Notes of mahogany, suppressed empathy, and offshore accounts.* It was sharp. We assigned it. Two days before publication, a billionaire — a real one, living, breathing, insufficiently satirized by the universe — announced an actual fragrance line. Same energy. Same demographic target. Real press release, real distribution deal, real retail price point that was, somehow, more absurd than the one our writer invented.
We killed the piece. The writer took it well. I didn't. The cologne, reportedly, sold out in seventy-two hours.
Case Two. One of our staff writers spent three weeks on a piece about a Senate subcommittee convened to regulate artificial intelligence, populated by members who demonstrably did not know what artificial intelligence was. The joke — and it was a good joke — was that the subcommittee's most substantive contribution was asking a technology CEO whether "the cyber" was "in the phone or behind the phone." We'd workshopped the dialogue. We'd tuned every tin-eared question for maximum comic density.
The piece came back from fact-check with a note that said: This is real. The subcommittee is real. The questions are real. The quote about the cyber is from the public record.
I sat with that for a while. Then I had a drink. Then I sat with it some more.
Case Three is the one that still gets brought up at editorial meetings, usually by someone who thinks they're being funny. We ran a piece — ran it, published it, sent the newsletter — about a city's 311 service being replaced by an AI chatbot that responded to every complaint, regardless of content, with a haiku. Pothole on Elm Street: haiku. Noise complaint: haiku. Missing recycling bin: haiku, with seasonal imagery.
The reader response was unlike anything I'd seen. Not because they loved it. Because they were angry. Because seventeen separate readers emailed to inform us, with varying degrees of aggression, that this was already happening in their city. Not the haiku specifically. But the chatbot. The automated deflection. The poetry of non-response.
We ran a correction. I'm not sure what the hell we were correcting. The piece was fiction. The readers were right. Both things remained true.
Here's my working theory, developed over several years and one informal Slack channel we started calling #is-this-real: satire used to be amplification. You took something that was ten percent absurd and you ran it up to ninety. The distance between reality and the joke was the space where the laugh lived. Now the math has inverted. Reality is running at something like ninety percent absurd on a slow news cycle, and our job — if we're being honest about it — is deflation. We file it down to sixty percent so it reads like something a person made up rather than something that happened.
The copy desk has a flag now. It reads: Insufficient distance from fact. I had it laminated.
Three interns have left for PR in the past eighteen months. I understand. In PR, you also make things up. But the things you make up are less depressing, the health insurance is better, and nobody sends you a correction because a city in the Midwest accidentally validated your comic premise in reality.
I want to be careful here not to sound like a man delivering a eulogy for something that isn't dead yet. Satire isn't dead. Satire is fine. Satire is, in fact, having a moment — the wrong kind of moment, the kind where everyone is doing it and most of them are just angry people with Canva access, but still.
What I'm describing is something more specific: the discipline of the form. The craft of maintaining enough fictional altitude that the reader can breathe up there, can look down at the landscape of the absurd and recognize it without drowning in it. That's harder than it sounds. It requires distance. Distance requires a gap between what is and what we're pretending. The gap keeps narrowing.
And yet.
Every piece we've run that landed — the ones that made people send it to someone else, which is the only metric that matters — they worked because underneath the joke was something true. Not factually true. Structurally true. The world is not making sense, the piece said, and here is a formal demonstration. Satire, at its least stupid, is insisting that the world should make sense. Not that it does. That it should. The joke is the demand.
I still believe in that. I believe in it on Monday mornings, before the Reuters feed loads, in the narrow window between the second and third coffee when the submissions folder is still full of possibilities and Gary hasn't emailed yet about the timeshare.
Next week's column will be funnier, I promise — assuming Congress, the Vatican, and the venture capital community can all be convinced to take Tuesday off.
— The Editor.
If it's the Editor's Mess, let HIM clean it up!
Editor's Mess runs irregularly, on a schedule that reflects the editor's confidence in the future of linear time.