I Miss Middlebury Professors

Intimidation abounds in New York. And I've been feeling intimidated about my writing lately, and honestly not feeling up to it, so that's one of my excuses for the lag time between posts.
I've gotten no feedback on my work at CRI on the twelve 300-word profiles I've written and submitted so far. However, no feedback might be good feedback, if Brian (CRI boss) regards my work the same way Matt (PT boss) does. Three assignments for the next issue (that being January) got me jazzed, and I exuberantly wrote the first draft of a short piece on intimidation (ironically). Matt provided a few constructively critical comments on that first attempt, so I revamped it and sent it back. "Nice effort," he said, but this second draft won't work at all either. So he rewrote it for me. Entirely new and annoyingly quippy. Then he tacked on my byline, but I'm not okay with that.
The second assignment I submitted, on the correlation of attractiveness and length of hair (stupid topic anyway), and I got comments similar to those on my first draft of my first assignment. I'm disinclined to put effort into the second draft.
Another editor boss, Jay, has assigned us interns to research for a story on unconscious motivation. So I called up this researcher/professor at Duke, Gavan Fitzsimons, who studies unconscious motivation as it pertains to consumer decision making. We talked for over an hour and had this great rapport. He's doing really fascinating work, especially what he told me about the voir dire process, when attorneys question jurors before the trial about their backgrounds and potential biases. Apparently, leading questions, such as "how likely would you be to judge the defendent guilty if you knew he were in a gang?", influence a juror's inclinations--in this case, they'd be more likely to favor a harsher sentence.
He took a break here to say that this is why science writing is so important. Marketing and advertising industries have incentive to keep abreast of the latest psychological findings--it pays to know that consumers associate a class of characteristics with certain vowel sounds, for example--but there's still a chasm between evidence-based psychology and policy. I'm not going to pretend that I know about how policy is made, but I don't think it's risky to guess that there isn't as much money in policy as there is in advertising. DUH.
Anyway, Dr. Fitzsimons pointed out that judicial consultants aren't likely to read every issue of the Applied Behavioral Science Review (they should). But it's more likely that they'll be reading the newspaper, Popular Science, the like. Or someone they know might. More accessible, more digestible than academic journals.
So that was inspiring.
I went to transcribe the tape a week later and discovered it was blank.
I sent a fiery email to Jay, subject: "F***", to solicit some solace, but he didn't respond and I haven't seen him.