Item — HN Reader

Editor Extraordinaire? Perhaps, but Remnick does a shit job of making the case. He retells stories too often told, and without doing the work of the writer: to make us see something we could not have otherwise imagined.

The N Yorker suffers from chronic digititis: the loss of quality in the pursuit of senseless quantity

1 comments

Probably worth linking the obit you submitted (thanks for that btw!):

Robert Gottlieb, editor of literary heavyweights, dies at 92 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337975 - June 2023 (no comments)

(also, it would be better to share something interesting about Gottlieb than complain about Remnick/NYer - most people here have never heard any of the stories you're talking about or even know who he is. One of HN's functions is to offer a sort of basic education about this kind of stuff for readers over time)

Here’s one from Wikipedia:

In a 1994 interview with The Paris Review, Gottlieb described his need to "surrender" to a book. "The more you have surrendered," he said, "the more jarring its errors appear. I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won't use a pencil the first time through because I'm just reading for impressions. When I read the end, I'll call the writer and say, I think it's very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don't know why I think that—I just think it. Then I go back and read the manuscript again, more slowly, and I find and mark the places where I had negative reactions to try to figure out what's wrong. The second time through I think about solutions—maybe this needs expanding, maybe there's too much of this so it's blurring that."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gottlieb

That's fascinating - thank you!

He's describing a phenomenological as opposed to analytical approach.