I exchanged e-mails a couple of months ago with Sam Zell, the iconoclastic owner of the Chicago Tribune. I had written him to quite cheekily suggest that I might write some really interesting pieces, the likes of which his quaking and conservative editors would never commission me to write.

Sam and I would shove these articles down the editors' throats, to show them the kind of journalistic spirit he was looking for to save the paper.

Zell replied to say he trusted the editors to "give readers what they want," and I thanked him for writing and dismissed him as just a rich version of the familiar fool who hides behind a notion he knows is not true: that readers wake up in the morning knowing just what they want to read in their newspaper (if only they would tell us, and we could give it to them!).

It's nonsense, most recently and hilariously revealed when a client of mine polled readers on their educational needs. The survey yielded a few good ideas for seminars–ideas immediately called into question by the answers we got to another question, on what kinds of speakers they'd like to hear:

Jack Welch. Bob Costas. Condi Rice. Bill Walsh.

Walsh is dead, and we have just as good a chance of getting him to speak as any of the others.

Other suggestions included the likes of William Horton, Barbara Wallraff, Bryan Garner, Jared Spool, JoAnn Hackos, and of course the inimitable Taz Tally.

As soon as I figure out who any of these people are, I'll get back to you.

Communicators, repeat after me (as I repeat, once again, after the late Larry Ragan): Knowing what readers want is your job, not your readers'.

Maybe I've been in Ohio too long; maybe I'm watching too much TV. But a thought keeps repeating itself, and I'd like to get it off my chest:

It sure takes some of the thrill out of living in a "free" society when you realize that the society is largely organized around corporations that intellectually enslave us all week and then bludgeon us with cold banalities all weekend. "The question is," I heard the lady hiss a dozen times while watching the Ryder Cup, "when you turn your car on … does it return the favor?"

Americans once threw off British rule. Individually or collectively, do we not have the spirit to wriggle out of corporate boredom?

Lately I'm reading Sin and the Second City, a book about prostitution and its enemies in Chicago around the turn of the last century. What's interesting is that the most sympathetic characters–indeed, the most contemporary ones–are Minna and Ada Everleigh, owners of the most notorious brothel of the era. What's to like about these sisters: They know their own minds, they're not hypocrites, they have a fixed idea of what quality is in their business and, unlike the legal beagles and religious reformers who dog them, they have a sense of humor.

In response to a government inquiry into how her conscience allowed her to be a madam, Minna laughed. "I am writing," she said, "what I will call The Biography of A Lost Soul."

As for those dead, failed reformers, I'm reminded of them as I sit in a hospital in Ohio accompanying my dad as he takes some medical tests. I'm on the computer in his room, playing games with the silly minds of the hospital's IT programmers, who let me read news, but don't let me read sports, let me read endless "opinion columns" about pigs and lipstick but not a "lifestyle" essay by a friend whose wife is dying of Alzheimer's.

I realize I'm playing the Internet hide-and-seek game corporate employees andexecutives play all day long with IT programs designed to limit Internet access in the name of "productivity."

What a universal humiliation. How silly this will all look someday.