The List Read Online Free Page B

ask her if Capitolist headquarters also doubled as our country’s uranium plant, but I was distracted by
     the sight of Nathaniel Heard, a Congress reporter I saw on TV all the time. He was
     shorter in person, and his hair looked like he washed it with chlorine. But he had
     the sheen of someone very busy and important. That, I decided, was what I would radiate
     in less than a week, even if I had to donate all my Kérastase hair products to an
     animal shelter.
    The receptionist motioned to me to follow Nathaniel throughthe door. But first I had to put my thumb on some sort of soul-stealing reader. Two
     frosted doors, etched with the company logo, slid open at my thumb’s command. I felt
     like I was about to open the Christian Dior couture show. “Think authority! Think
     girl genius!” I whispered to myself as I walked down the navy blue carpeted hall roughly
     the length of an airplane runway.
    Not one person looked up at me or the coif I had just paid Nancy Pelosi’s stylist
     several hundred dollars to create. All I could hear besides my overactive heartbeat
     were the murmur of dozens of massive televisions tuned to CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and
     C-SPAN, an occasional serious-sounding phone conversation, and the frenetic pitter-patter
     of calloused fingers on keyboards.
    On every wall THE CAPITOLIST was printed in huge, navy blue block letters. Some of the letters were painted on;
     others floated slightly above the wall. But they were everywhere, just in case someone
     had a bout of dementia and forgot where they worked. The walls were gray, the desks
     were gray, the ceilings were gray, and the faces that hovered semipossessed behind
     computers looked a touch ashen, too. But heck! It was probably just the lighting.
     This was the place to be right now. So they hired people with a lack of skin pigment.
     Pish posh. History was being changed by these waxen beings, and I was lucky to join
     them.
    I learned very soon that people who were important had two desks. People who were
     less important had one. And people of the least importance, like me and the other
     Style section girls, had one small desk in the very back of the office in a corner
     with no windows.
    I found Rachel sitting at her desk, her dark, angular haircut swooshing like a sail
     as she typed. She welcomed me with a smile, gave me a hug, and put a BlackBerry, two
     backup batteries, and a headset into my sweaty hand.
    “This is your BlackBerry,” she declared. She pointed to the device, gripped tightly
     by my navy blue Capitolist -pride manicured nails, and said, “Keep it with you at all times. It helps if you
     imagine that it’s Velcroed to your hand. Feel free to do that if it makes it easier.”
    I looked down at the phone and saw that it was already turned on and had the phrase
     “Write to Live, Live to Write” as a screen saver. That would have to be changed at
     once.
    “We’ve disabled the off buttons on all the phones, so just keep charging it when the
     battery is low. If it breaks from overuse—which it will—no problem, we’ll get you
     a new one immediately. And it’s configured to work in every country in the world.
     Even East Timor.” I expected us to share a hearty laugh right about then, but Rachel
     was silent.
    She reached across the desk and wrapped my fingers around the device a little tighter.
    “If you don’t reply to an email within three minutes, I will be calling you. The pace
     is frenetic here, to put it mildly. We write seven to ten articles a day. It sounds
     like a lot, and it is. If you’re re-reporting a story, get fresh quotes. Don’t start
     paragraphs with questions; I hate that. Speed is more important than grammatical accuracy.
     You can always change a comma, not a time stamp. Have a good kicker, but don’t take
     ten minutes to write it. You don’t have to come up with your own headlines, but I
     will like you more if you do. So do. And they have to stay under one hundred and