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John Bloom began his career with Texas Monthly in the seventies, when the magazine business was still feeling the afterglow of the New Journalism boom and editorial policies were as freewheeling as could be. “We would routinely spend three or four months on an article, intensively researching it, and then spend a full month editing,” he told me earlier this month. “We would just assign a topic—not even a story. “ ‘Go off and do the King Ranch,’ and then you’re sent off and you don’t even know what the article is, and [you] come back four months later. I was from that era.” But Bloom’s career took an unexpected turn when his B movie–loving alter ego, “Joe Bob Briggs,” became a full-time job in the eighties, leading…

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