A Coral Anniversary

My heart sank when I first saw the magazine’s thirtieth-anniversary issue on paper. My managing editor back then, Michael Strizic, and I had spent the morning pacing in our small, dark office — anxious to receive several heavy boxes from Ottawa. Eventually I couldn’t stand the anticipation, so I walked ten minutes or so to Harbord Bakery to distract myself. The magazines had arrived by the time I returned.

Mistakes are not unusual in a periodical with tens of thousands of words and many moving parts, though they’re usually the kind that most people would never catch: a quotation mark curled the wrong way, an errant thin space, a slightly vague antecedent. Occasionally they’re more pronounced. For example, did you notice that our “A Journal of Ideas” tag line was missing from the April cover? Technically, it’s there, but it’s knocked out in white, because the April artwork was supposed to be darker than what you received in the mail. We made a change at the last...