Looking Back With Intensity – NYTimes.com

Shalmon Bernstein arrived in the New York magazine world in the early 1970s with a fully developed eye, a clear, sober voice and a sense of purpose. “I thought in terms of being able to change people’s perceptions,” he said. Then, a decade later, he simply stopped, for reasons that even now are hard for him to explain. “What made me stop?” he asked the other day from his home in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “What was more important to me?” Money was a part of it, he said. But looking back now, he saw another force at work.

“I think I felt totally defeated by anything I was doing.”