The New York Times asksNew York Times whether Marx was right. Doug Henwood and a handful of others respond. Henwood reviewed Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century for the April/May issue of Bookforum. (Spoiler: Henwood says yes.)
Jake Silverstein, currently the editor of Texas Monthly, has been hired to be the new editor of the New York Times Magazine. According to Times managing editor Dean Baquet, Silverstein will help the magazine build a stronger relationship with the rest of the paper; closer ties with the newsroom, Baquet argues, will give the magazine “a greater sense of urgency.”
At the LRB, Geoff Dyer’s eloquent and moving account of his recent stroke.
A fourteen-year-old has encouraged the federal government to switch to Garamond, a change that could save one hundred and thirty-six million dollars in printing costs annually. Speaking of printing: it would take more than a million pages to print a copy of Wikipedia entire, or a thousand volumes at twelve hundred pages each. A group called PediaPress is trying to raise the money to do so, with the intent of displaying the books at an August Wikimania conference in London. They promise they’ll plant trees to make up for all the paper.
Leo Robson on a recent crop of wearyingly boosterish books about reading.
Do book editors edit? An editor at Harper insists, on the New Yorker‘s blog, that they do, and blames insecure writers for spreading any idea to the contrary: “The myth of the non-editing book editor provides a comforting frame of mind for the M.F.A. writer with an unpublished manuscript.” A senior editor at Holt agrees: “No one thinks anyone does their job. It’s the prevailing and instinctual accusation of anyone who feels, within a particular context, powerless.”