quarry. What we were doing was the journalistic version of la
mattanza, Mike said. We were patiently lying in wait until we were
ready to publish and then, at some time of our choosing, we would
strike. As he said this, he mimicked a Sicilian fisherman violently
wielding his spear, which made me laugh.
I told him that I was on board with the mattanza approach as long
as the story ran before Holmes’s appearance at the Journal’s annual
technology conference in Laguna Beach in October. I had recently
gotten wind that she was on the conference’s list of guest speakers and
felt that it would put the paper in an impossible position if my article
hadn’t been published by then. Mike agreed. The conference was two
and a half months away. That gave us ample time, he said.