Editor’s Note
Bob Bickford

I’ve spent this long weekend at my desk, getting Galaxy Brain Twenty-Five ready. A few stragglers, but we’re mostly ready.

Previous editor Yael Friedman and I agree: 

We aren’t Michael Murray. We do our best to honor him with this effort, but he is Galaxy Brain. We can wear his flip-flops, but we can’t dance in them.

MM didn’t just make people feel special. He saw their specialness, and insisted that they be special, drew it out of them. If you had a pineapple and two oranges in your shopping bag, you’d find yourself juggling for him, laughing to tears because you didn’t even know you could juggle. Murray gave you a standing ovation and it felt like you just juggled at the Kennedy Center.

Nobody else has ever been as delighted to run into me on a random internet street corner. When he left, I learned how many people felt the same way. We all found out, this past year, how big absences can be.

We can’t do any of what he did.

I’m looking down the bench at Twenty-Five, though, and it’s a pretty great array of talent. Some GB veterans, a bunch of rookies. I can’t make them feel like they just juggled at the Kennedy Center, so I hope they hear MM echoes telling them how good they are.

I have a couple of spectacular leadoff hitters. These two artists open up Issue 25 and park it in the goddam bleachers, straightaway center, back-to-back. Stunning. This isn’t my gig to be proud of, but I know wherever Murray is, he thinks I scooped this pair better than Woodward and Bernstein. I’m so excited, I could spit.

One is in his eighties, the other in her nineties. They are brilliant and astonishing, so much fun, Kennedy Center jugglers. Read that again—eighties and nineties, and they’ll blow you away.

This whole group will. One by one, jugglers all.

Murray is sitting in the dugout shadows, smiling, with a clipboard on his lap. Bet on it.