[HN Gopher] A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite Hi...
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A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
Author : acabal
Score : 70 points
Date : 2024-10-22 03:20 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| tptacek wrote:
| "Keenly attuned to his guests' networks and net worths" is a cute
| turn of phrase.
|
| Watch out for this story, it'll suck you in.
| ballooney wrote:
| Exactly the sort of darling that that my college tutor would
| have said needed to be killed. "Yes, I know you're very proud
| of it..."
| stavros wrote:
| Why would they say that it needs to be killed? To what end?
| pjc50 wrote:
| The phrase "kill your darlings" circulates in fiction
| writing schools. The reasoning is that a "darling" turn of
| phrase which the author _really_ likes is likely something
| that they are irrationally obsessed over and that distorts
| the editing process around itself, to the detriment of
| overall quality.
|
| Like a lot of writing advice this is _really_ subjective.
| toyg wrote:
| I think it boils down to "nobody likes a showoff",
| really.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Again, subjective. Some people like it and it can be a
| valid literary art form in itself. It's only in purely
| utilitarian text like technical writing where it doesn't
| belong.
| durumu wrote:
| I feel like this comes up with me in programming too!
| Like if I write some really beautiful function as part of
| solving a problem, I will be a lot sadder if it doesn't
| make it in, sometimes to my detriment. Similar energy to
| "cattle not pets".
| lynx23 wrote:
| Probably the most important lesson my C mentor ever told
| me: "Never be afraid to delete code, no matter how nice
| you think it is." It still hasn't fully landed with me,
| and I can relate to what you wrote. But I am trying to.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| As well as "Build one to throw away. You will anyway."
| dxdm wrote:
| I'm not who you're replying to, but I agree with them. For
| my taste, it's a little too clever. It distracts from the
| subject of the text and instead draws attention to the form
| of the text itself and its author.
|
| Worse than that, it's clunky-sounding and trips me up
| verbally.
|
| That's subjective, of course, but I would have preferred if
| the author had left out this turn of phrase.
| stavros wrote:
| I see what you mean (it doesn't quite work for me
| either), but it works for some people, so eh. I guess the
| sibling is right, it's subjective.
| vundercind wrote:
| A couple well-placed em-dashes and at least it doesn't read
| like the author is trying to rap.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Eh, how often do you get to drop a new zeugma? I'll allow it.
| ajdlinux wrote:
| I have just lost an hour of my workday. A good longform profile
| of a single controversial character will do that to me.
| parkcedar wrote:
| https://archive.is/v4CBl
| brg wrote:
| Charges dropped.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/nyregion/don-henley-eagle...
| kleiba wrote:
| https://archive.is/5Wu3G
| verisimi wrote:
| I love this line:
|
| > Rick Gekoski, a book dealer who did business with Mr.
| Horowitz, described him in 2007 as "a terrific combination of
| a scholar and a grifter."
| a1o wrote:
| This magazine shows a pop that makes Safari ignore the gesture to
| go back, can't scroll up to go back to the address bar. For
| people using Safari on iPhone, is there any secret gesture to
| kill a tab like this?
| ycombinete wrote:
| Put it into reader mode as soon as the page loads, before the
| pop-up spawns.
| lynx23 wrote:
| Switch to the "Tabs" tab and kill it?
| Pikamander2 wrote:
| It also crashes my Chrome tab on Android.
| Karellen wrote:
| Rotate the phone to landscape mode, and then into portrait. The
| address and tab bars should be displayed on the change to
| portrait.
| fergie wrote:
| A well written article, but it could probably have been like 10%
| of the length.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I wonder how much shorter Crime and Punishment could have been
| made!
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| You can always run it through an LLM to create a summary of any
| desired length. Never know what you'll be missing, though. You
| might actually _enjoy_ the experience of reading the original
| article yourself. Try it, see how it goes?
| gwern wrote:
| Assuming the summary is accurate. Which I'm not sure is the
| case - as it happens, yesterday an actual LLM summary of OP
| struck me as missing important parts: https://www.reddit.com/
| r/Longreads/comments/1g8so93/a_contro...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| It's accurate but not deep enough. It's pretty important to
| specify the summary length you're after, in my experience,
| rather than just leaving it up to the model.
|
| I asked GPT4o explicitly for an 800-word summary just now,
| roughly one page of single-spaced text, and I really don't
| see how it could have done much better: https://chatgpt.com
| /share/671810c7-477c-800b-a752-376ce6074a...
| blantonl wrote:
| Just enough admiration by the author to make someone think they
| should be like this guy, and approaching life like him is
| appropriate.
|
| Walking away after reading that article, I don't know whether or
| not to be appalled, or intrigued by the intricacies of the book
| collecting world and this dude.
|
| One thing is for certain, if someone owed me six figures and they
| just hand waved it away with a slight of hand, I'd start throwing
| some chairs.
| hristov wrote:
| What a scumbag. Make sure to read to the end of the article to
| read about things that he undoubtedly stole. Good job by the New
| Yorker journalist getting to the bottom of things and not being
| charmed by this psychopath. Very good article overall.
|
| It is very depressing to see large public and non profit
| institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending
| millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It
| is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their
| notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay
| millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of
| these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public
| or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to
| waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems
| like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely
| came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they
| had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much
| less.
|
| But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves
| to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch
| "you will be so respected if you become an antique books and
| manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They
| will forget about your business dealings."
| blantonl wrote:
| He was a market maker where there was very little liquidity.
| Given that, all valuations in this world are subjective at
| best. He just made more liquidity than most, so the process of
| spitballing valuations became more focused on one individual
| doing it. Him. He just sprinkled in a little sociopathy to make
| it more beneficial to him.
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