From today’s Crimson, a look at the legal beagle as a Cambridge pup and his evolution into today’s New Yorker contributor. An excerpt (what’s with the single-sentence grafs, by the way?):

Toobin’s parents may have scared their son away from the profession.

His mother, Marlene Sanders, covered the Vietnam War and was a pioneering woman in television reporting. His father, Jerome Toobin, a producer for Bill Moyers, was at the vanguard of public broadcasting.

According to Toobin’s wife, his mother warned her son against going into journalism.

“Don’t touch it,” she said, “because success and failure are so randomly distributed.”
…
[Years later,] “He was very frustrated with the job at the moment,” current New Yorker editor David Remnick says. It was 1993, and Tina Brown had recently become editor of the eminent weekly.

Remnick had just joined the magazine as a staff writer. He and Toobin met at a dive bar. Over a drink, Remnick suggested Toobin meet with Brown.

“I basically changed careers over a weekend,” Toobin says.

Talk of the Town, the storied house built by E.B. White and James Thurber, needed another layer of paint, and Brown wanted Toobin to add a newsier finish.

Remnick says that Toobin’s experience made him a natural hire.

“He was coming at this a little on the late side, but he had knowledge about an area of life. Jeff had been out in the world,” Remnick says.

“He wasn’t just a graduate of an unfortunate University in the suburbs of Boston,” Remnick—who was rejected from Harvard—says.

You know you can read the full-text archives of (at least in theory) everyone who’s ever written for the Crim, right? For instance, the early reporting of Hendrik Hertzberg, the heartthrob of Barnard Hall. (According to my mother.) As you’ll see if you visit the archive search page, the staffers have some name-variation and other kinks to work out, and the archive is still far from complete. Still, here, for example, is Toobin on Tom Lehrer, of “Masochism Tango” and “The Elements” fame (and here’s a very clever animation of the latter). Catch up with your favorite graduates! By the way, my hed there is kind of a chiasmus, in case you’re keeping track.

Unrelated but breaking (at least by my definition): Here’s an engaging profile (from the Louisville Courier-Journal) of the likably eccentric Fairleigh Brooks, who won the caption contest with his Tarzan “McKenzie” quip.