Is Stalin best understood as an editor? From the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Even when not wielding his [signature] blue pencil, Stalin’s editorial zeal was all-consuming. He excised people—indeed whole peoples—out of the manuscript of worldly existence, had them vanished from photographs and lexicons, changed their words and the meanings of their words, edited conversations as they happened, backing his interlocutors into more desirable (to him) formulations.”
Bloomberg Businessweek runs an excerpt of Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a forthcoming book about Jeff Bezos and the ascent of Amazon. Here’s a terrifying little nugget about the new owner of the Washington Post: “The one unguarded thing about Bezos is his laugh—a pulsing, mirthful bray that he leans into while craning his neck back. He unleashes it often, even when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else. And it startles people. ‘You can’t misunderstand it,’ says Rick Dalzell, Amazon’s former chief information officer, who says Bezos often wields his laugh when others fail to meet his lofty standards. ‘It’s disarming and punishing. He’s punishing you.’”
Darryl Pinckney considers “the ethics of appreciation” in a lovely essay about Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt—the literary figures looming large in the days after Pinckney moved to New York to be “a mad black queen.” After years of contributing to the rise of childhood obesity and the hoarding of cheap plastic toys, McDonald’s is finally doing something good for kids: encouraging them to read. Under a new promotion, anybody who orders a Happy Meals will receive one of “four nutrition–themed original books for children” starring a dodo, goat, dinosaur or ant.
In a controversial post on the Amazon message boards, Anne Rice suggested that well-written negative reviews are so difficult to pull off that writers who do should get paid.
A Paris Review interview, her New Yorkershort story archive, and a Millions introduction to her work: the quick and dirty guide to newly minted Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro.