"And you're doing me wrong / You're doing me wrong / I'm burning slowly / I'm lying down and you / You're doing me wrong / You're doing me wrong" (Haaretz supplement editor in his song "You're Doing Me Wrong")
We call him "Shchori Mark" [Translator's note: A play on words combining the editor's name with "black soup"]. Every Saturday we snuggle up with "Haaretz" under the blanket, open the newspaper, look at the cover of the supplement - and burst out laughing. Shchori almost never disappoints. Every week since his appointment last year as the editor of Haaretz supplement, he'll prepare a Saturday cover that will try to make your soul black, and the trend will continue throughout the supplement. Bad, bad, bad, I love you terribly.
Perhaps since his days as a rocker, Shchori tends towards the bias that bad is good, depressing is deep, negative is brave, difficult is real, and black is, well, beautiful. This is a well-known cognitive bias in the field of behavioral economics, diagnosed by the famous Israeli psychologist, Benjamin Netanyahu, as the sourness bias. Even before the Shchori era, my previous partner asked me: Why is Haaretz called Haaretz [Translator's note: "The Land" in Hebrew]? What is actually the ultimate goal of Haaretz, the central message it conveys to you over the years behind all the articles and essays? I thought for a minute or two, and gave the correct answer: to leave the country.
Every Saturday I beg my partner not to read the supplement before sex, and every Saturday she doesn't listen to me, brave soul that she is. And then, sensitive soul that she is - the description of a girl being baked and eaten by her parents, confessions of sister-killers, rape of refugees right in the face, or just the wonders of occupation - all these somehow reduce her desire. One day I'll write a research paper on Haaretz's contribution to the phenomenon of "lesbian bed death", but before that, I'll do justice to our Shchori.
The Haaretz supplement has been in a process of deterioration for many years, like the entire newspaper, but to the depths it reached in the last months of the previous editor's tenure, Moran Sharir, it hasn't yet returned under Shchori's leadership. Sometimes it seemed to me that the editor was doing this intentionally in order to change positions. During that period, entire supplements appeared that had nothing to read. I would start the stopwatch, go through the supplement and announce to my friend a new record: this is the shortest supplement ever. It had never taken me so little time to finish it. Things got to the point where Galeria, the permanent disgrace and worst of the weekend supplements, sometimes took longer. Imagine that, Galeria!
Indeed, in the first supplements edited by Shchori, the supplement took off. The earth-shattering change was noticeable to the eye already in the first issue, and not all of it was right in my opinion, but the spirit was correct. The desire to return to serious investigations (that is, black ones of course) was also correct. A small black pearl that hid in the margins of the supplement was "Yaki and Aliza", very short prose from Shchori's own pen, which read like something Zipper refused to publish, and now Shchori publishes in his own supplement without giving a damn, as he easily surpasses Alex Epstein's childish kitsch next to him. This was one of the best corners in the supplement, precisely because it was a particularly strange peek into the Shchorian soul, and it also ended strangely and without explanation recently - but in a certain sense, it suits it. What does a young man like Shchori have to do with this geriatric couple? Are these his aging parents? Are these the newspaper readers he imagines? Is this his relationship in disguise? There's no doubt that it was an endearing deviation, which made me fond of our Shchori. Something of his soul was exposed in it, something of the attraction to death and melancholy and pessimism and hopelessness and terminal - and to the banal.
But the improvement didn't last long, and wasn't stable. It turns out that even for a talented guy like Shchori, ideas run out after a few dozen supplements. This is a general problem related to staffing at Haaretz. There is a long line of writers in all parts of the newspaper who simply shouldn't be there, or who have lost it, and the editorial board doesn't know how to get rid of them or replace them. So what's the solution? Replace the editor every few months?
The solution probably lies in the golden age of the supplement. The state of Haaretz in recent years often reminds me of Steve Jobs' saying:
A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies
For many years, Haaretz was a newspaper of A people. It's hard to say that's the case in recent years. To me, the young one, it seems that the main problem is that a supplement editor at Haaretz simply needs to be a person of considerable cultural and personal stature, and yes - older, mature, with seniority and life experience. The attempt to rejuvenate the supplement through young editors, who supposedly will appeal to the younger generation, doesn't make it younger but rather more immature and less intelligent. A mature and balanced editor, a Renaissance man, an intellectual with depth of thought and constant curiosity that has accumulated into extensive general knowledge, to whom nothing human is foreign - in short, an A person in giant font - these are the minimum requirements for the job, and these are not requirements that no one in our talent-blessed country can meet, as the supplement proved in its golden years, before the current black era. Such a person would know how to balance between black and white, between innovation and gravitas, between high culture and humor, and between occupation and sex.