Contrast Wayne’s legacy with the Trumpworthy approach to Today’s Content. In today’s mediasphere, headlines are crafted not merely to grab eyeballs but to jerk knees and get share-buttons clicked.

And somehow, all the twitching and the Pavlovian sharing is supposed to create a viable personal brand through conspicuous consumption. Except here nothing is actually consumed and certainly nothing is digested; it’s just cooked in short order, plated and passed around till it’s cold and moldy and forgotten. We come hungry to the internet and TV and, occasionally, quaintly, the magazine and the tabloid. We pick something off the menu, rave about it to our friends and kin, then rush off without eating, hungrier than ever. We come to value the appetite more than fullness.

Wayne’s journalism made you sit down and chew your food. Maybe every meal didn’t please your palate, but many more of them did, and you were always happy for the nourishment.

Wayne died the day before Donald John Trump of Queens was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. Since then—before then, to be honest—I’ve been adrift, dumb, immobile, confounded by my world. And then, a while ago, an editor emailed me to ask me for a piece on Wayne. This all has a point, I swear. I’m just getting to it now.