Frenemies

I worked briefly at a newspaper in college, and we'd occasionally have guest speakers. One asked us how much of our own paper we read each day, and we admitted, 'Not too much.' "Of course you don't," he said. "You're out chasing down stories. The only ones you read are your own to see how badly they got messed up in copy editing and your enemies' stories to see if they're doing better work than you." Even these days, it's nice when one of your enemies blows it, and the advent of social networking makes it much easier to keep score of these mistakes. You can take a look at what high school frenemies have swelled to the size of small cars or been through three marriages in as many years. The flipside is that it's even more disappointing when the really attractive people from high school have gone on to great success.