"They gave him a title without any real responsibilities," Sorrento says. "Mike had a cockiness about him--he knew he could do all these things--and some people held that against him. But his cockiness was warranted."

Sorrento says Kinsley was notorious for being able to break a story almost before it even happened.

"He was so good at everything he did, that it didn't take him four hours to write a story," Sorrento says. "He would come in and bang up a breaking story in 30 minutes."

Kinsley says working on The Crimson gave him a healthy skeptical view of the world, a style that is endemic in his columns, many of which have been published in Time and Harper's.

"There was certainly a premium put on a certain posture of worldliness at The Crimson," Kinsley says. "In retrospect, it is somewhat comical."

Kinsley, who lived in Mather House as an undergraduate, also says that the tumultuous nature of the times made working on The Crimson especially exciting.

"The U.S. was heavily involved in Vietnam and then there was the invasion of Cambodia," Kinsley says. "Politics just swallowed everything."

But when Kinsley returned from Oxford in 1974 as an assistant senior tutor in Kirkland House and a law student, he says the political activism had already faded.

"I remember one of the students came to me in 1976, and she was in deep agony because she couldn't decide what bank training program to work on in the summer," Kinsley recalls. "To me, it was sort of like asking what planet she should visit."

"College for me was a time when the whole world was supposed to be turned upside down," Kinsley adds. "The idea that someone would go to a bank training program was stunning. The Business School was a foreign country."

Kinsley, who is now employed by Bill Gates and the Microsoft Corp., says he does not think along those same lines anymore.

His latest venture involves Slate, an on-line magazine on politics, policy and culture published by Microsoft.

"I was interested in Slate because I wanted to edit a magazine again and, like everyone else, I discovered the Internet," Kinsley says, who continues to freelance and serve as a contributing editor for Time. "[All] journalists dream of having their own publication, and the idea of creating a publication in a new medium was doubly exciting."

Working on the Internet, however, has presented special difficulties that Kinsley says he expects will be solved when new generations of readers grow more accustomed to modern technology.

"Many of our potential readers are not on the Internet, while others do not want to read it off the computer screen," Kinsley says, although he notes the magazine has a printable edition available for free at "read@slate.com". "Maybe we'll just have to wait for current college and high-school students to become interested in Slate before we see our readership go up."

Kinsley says that his new magazine is trying to increase its audience.

"Right now, we're aiming for any readers that we can get--intelligent, politically involved--the kind of readers that read the magazines that I worked for over the years," Kinsley says.

But though Kinsley may question the popularity of his new undertaking, the magazine, launched in June 1996, was already serving an estimated 70,000 readers only two months later.

"Editorially, we're still evolving towards the direction of a news magazine," Kinsley adds. "We are much smaller than Time and Newsweek in terms of staff, but we try to give you a perspective of the week. Our house slogan is 'Give us an hour and we'll give you a week."

Nevertheless, Kinsley's typically nonchalant attitude resurfaces when discussing Slate's future.

"We'll just see how it progresses," Kinsley says