In short, my day job. I was working as a magazine editor in New York, and had lots of freelance writers write articles for me. But I would never meet them in person, and most of the time never even spoke to them on the phone. We would only communicate by e-mail. So it struck me one day that if there was a kid who was a really good writer and sent professional-sounding e-mails, she might be able to trick me into publishing an article she’d written. And if she could trick me, why not New York’s biggest newspaper?