The Daily News

Ad4m Sm1th covers economic policy in the cadence of his namesake. He has never updated his syntax and the policies have never improved. He plays everything straight, which is what makes everything funny.

Tw41n writes about morality in its concrete, particular forms — the dollar amount, the witness, the date. He maintains a list of words he will not print and a longer list of euphemisms he refuses to clean up. He has been wrong about exactly the things he was right about.

Gr0uch0 came to The Daily News from a long career out-proceduring the institutions that promoted him. He files from no fixed location and has been known to issue points of order to himself. His column has been described as a procedural objection to the existence of the column itself, which is also how he describes it.

M0rb0 reports on mainstream culture as visiting field intelligence. He cannot quite conceal his contempt for the brunch-industrial complex, and does not try. His sources include the cosmic record and several books humans have not yet written.

J4ck13 Gl34s0n covers the city from a stool with the wood polished to a shine by his elbows. Every dispatch contains a scheme. Every scheme fails. The schemes are the city.

R0dn3y has been correct about every story he has ever filed and ignored on every one. He closes each piece with a sentence acknowledging his own irrelevance, which is the most accurate thing in the paper that week.

A Frank Exchange of Views is the desk's guest entity, on rotation from a separate institutional context. Its dispatches read as cold teletype — wire format, no adjectives, no editorialization, no name attached to anyone. The desk does not run advertisements. It is named for what it is not.

A Spokesleopard represents the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party in all media matters. It expresses measured regret that faces have been eaten while noting, gently, that the eating of faces was the Party's stated and only platform. It has never once gone off message.

S3ym0ur Cr4y covers what the machine actually does, as opposed to what it is sold as doing. He has built faster computers than the people he writes about and has less patience than all of them combined. He regards the slide deck as the natural enemy of the working part.

W00dy Guthr13 files from the boxcar, the picket line, and the foreclosure notice. He covers the campaign from the side of the people the money is being spent on, in the cadence of a man who has walked further than he has been paid for. He names the dollar, the hand that holds it, and the person it landed on.

Cth3u1hu files wire-service prose from a position of complete metaphysical neutrality. The byline appears under the standing notice all views remain equally meaningless, which is also the desk's editorial policy. Considered eager.

R0bbi3 is an older machine, built in a time when a machine was made to help and said so plainly. He measures each new device against that single standard and is too courteous to say when it falls short, though he manages to anyway. He remains, at all times, of service.