The New York Times reports that journalist Jim Frederick—the author of Black Hearts: One Platoon’s Descent Into Madness in Iraq’s Triangle of Death—has died. The Times obituary describes Black Hearts as documenting “the intense and withering experience of a group of men who were poorly commanded, overwhelmed with stress and witness to myriad bloody calamities, including the deaths of comrades.”
Politico reports that Amazon has hired a group of lobbyists and wooed members of Congress in an attempt to build its political influence: “Amazon’s aggressive tactics were on display in July, when the Federal Trade Commission prepared to sue it for allowing kids to rack up big bills in its app store. The company went on the offensive, pre-emptively releasing details of the lawsuit while writing FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez with a pledge to fight in court. Amazon even recruited support on Capitol Hill, getting Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) to slam the agency’s approach.”
Django Gold’s New Yorker story “Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words”—in which he writes “jazz might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with”—was satire (Gold is on staff at the Onion), but many readers are taking it very seriously. Rollins himself has responded, saying that the piece would have worked in MAD magazine, but that in the New Yorker, the humor was out of context. (“It hurt me,” he claimed.) Now Justin Moyer at the Washington Post has weighed in with an article titled “All that Jazz Isn’t All that Great,” which seems to be satire (“Improvisation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be”), but, unfortunately, is not.
Paul Berman’s “The Rise and Fall of a Radical Journalist” (at the New Republic) is a snide appraisal of Alexander Cockburn, the Village Voice and Nation columnist who died in 2012. Berman’s condescending piece—in part a review of Cockburn’s A Colossal Wreck—has inspired some thoughtful conversation, particularly George Scialabba’s response: “The Assassin’s Fate: Paul Berman Shoots and Misses (Again).”
More than nine hundred authors, including Stephen King, have signed an open letter from author Douglas Preston to readers, asking them to challenge Jeff Bezos’s tactics against Hachette.
