Bill Goggins
Sunday, July 30th, 2006
Bill Goggins, who died unexpectedly while running the San Francisco Marathon Sunday, was Wired’s man-behind-the-curtain for years until he recently moved on. Bill’s meticulous yet hilarious verbal skills, coupled with a work ethic rarely seen outside New England milltowns, quietly improved most of Wired’s feature stories and countless others in the late 90’s and early 00’s.
Bill had an exceptional ability to take a good story and make it better—clearer, catchier, more consistent—usually by changing only a few words, sometimes by making both editor and writer go back and re-examine their basic premises. I once spent weeks crafting a short piece on Ray Kurzweil that concluded with this paragraph.
Skeptics may say he’s flown off the charts himself, but Kurzweil is sure they’ll live to regret it. “The really surprising thing to me is how many Nobel Prize winners haven’t internalized the implications of the exponential rate of increase in the rate of knowledge itself,” he says. “It’s easy to explain these things in the language of mathematics. But to really understand them, you almost need to resort to religious terms.”
Bill read it and tacked on one more word:
Amen.
Whenever people comment on my ability to write clearly, I know Bill had a lot to do with it.
But I’ll remember him most for his dryly pointed wit around the office. When Chris Anderson’s first Wired cover, “Is Japan Still the Future?” was punched up by CondÈ Nast’s editorial director to “Japan Rocks!” Bill protested by posting a note above his desk in the same font, “If Japan’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’.”
I ran into Bill outside Cafe Divine recently and learned about his latest work revising San Francisco’s local guide magazine, TODO, to be easier to figure out in the back of a speeding cab. I’m glad I dawdled a few extra minutes to see him again.
Wired News and Boing Boing have more details and links.
Photo above: Bill with my wife Christina at a party in 2004.
