When I was editor of Business Day, around 2007, I briefly wrote a secret column. I’d become friendly with Branko Brkic, an intense, eccentric young man who had started a monthly print magazine called Maverick.

I think a media reporter, back when such positions existed, had called me to ask what I thought of the magazine. I replied to the effect that it was a solution looking for a problem. This amused Brkic and he suggested I might like to write a monthly column for him. While there were no rules preventing me from writing at the time, we agreed I would use a pseudonym...