{"id":186344,"date":"2014-02-23T20:55:00","date_gmt":"2014-02-24T01:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/02\/23\/best-resignation-letter-ever\/"},"modified":"2014-02-23T20:55:00","modified_gmt":"2014-02-24T01:55:00","slug":"best-resignation-letter-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/02\/23\/best-resignation-letter-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Resignation Letter Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Taibbi <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/blogs\/taibblog\/thank-you-rolling-stone-20140220\">writes a goodbye letter to <i>Rolling Stone<\/i><\/a> that should make his former bosses proud:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Today is my last day at <i>Rolling Stone. <\/i>As of this week, I\u2019m  leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that\u2019s  already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura  Poitras.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">I\u2019ll have plenty of time to talk about the new job elsewhere. But in this space, I just want to talk about <i>Rolling Stone, <\/i>and  express my thanks. Today is a very bittersweet day for me. As excited  as I am about the new opportunity, I\u2019m sad to be leaving this company.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">More than 15 years ago, <i>Rolling Stone <\/i>sent a reporter, Brian Preston, to do a story on the <i>eXile, <\/i>the  biweekly English-language newspaper I was editing in Moscow at the time  with Mark Ames. We abused the polite Canadian Preston terribly \u2013 I  think we thought we were being hospitable \u2013 and he promptly went home  and wrote a story about us that was painful, funny and somewhat  embarrassingly accurate. Looking back at that story now, in fact, I\u2019m  surprised that <i>Rolling Stone <\/i>managing editor Will Dana gave me a call years later, after I\u2019d returned to the States.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">I remember when Will called, because it was such an important moment in my life. I was on the American side of Niagara Falls, walking with friends, when my cell phone rang. Night had just fallen and when Will invited me to write a few things in advance of the 2004 presidential election, I nearly walked into the river just above the Falls.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">At the time, I was having a hard time re-acclimating to life in America and was a mess personally. I was broke and having anxiety attacks. I specifically remember buying three cans of corned beef hash with the last dollars of available credit on my last credit card somewhere during that period. Anyway I botched several early assignments for the magazine, but Will was patient and eventually brought me on to write on a regular basis.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">It was my first real job and it changed my life. Had Rolling Stone not given me a chance that year, God knows where I\u2019d be \u2013 one of the ideas I was considering most seriously at the time was going to Ukraine to enroll in medical school, of all things.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">No journalist has ever been luckier than me. Thank you, <i>Rolling Stone<\/i>.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s funny and gracious, and everyone at <i>Rolling Stone<\/i> should be proud of what he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matt Taibbi writes a goodbye letter to Rolling Stone that should make his former bosses proud: Today is my last day at Rolling Stone. As of this week, I\u2019m leaving to work for First Look Media, the new organization that\u2019s already home to reporters like Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill and Laura Poitras.I\u2019ll have plenty of &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[975,1002,1129,1218,1028],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-employment","category-good-writing","category-journalism","category-manners","category-people-i-do-not-want-to-piss-off"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}