It was a very public way to die. Public, that is, to the few thousand people on The Well. On March 25, 1995, Tom Mandel sat down at his computer and wrote: It's bad luck to say goodbye before it's time to do so and there's no point in embracing death before one's time, but I thought maybe I'd sneak in a topic, not too maudlin I hope, in which I could slowly say goodbye to my friends here, curse my enemies one more time and otherwise wave a bit at the rest of you until it's just not time to do so any more. Mandel might have felt he owed a heartfelt goodbye to all the people he had wrangled with for nearly a decade. Perhaps he wanted to make amends with the many who considered him arrogant and obstinate; as one of The Well's most controversial figures, he had excited a great deal of scorn as well as admiration. But in truth, Tom Mandel was only doing what he had done nearly every day, and sometimes several times a day, for years: dialing in to a community where he had found a home … [Read more...] about The Epic Saga of The Well