Editor is a job title that feels deliberately obfuscating, like chief financial officer or art dealer. Within it lay multitudes of duties, predilections, sensibilities and manias. An editor can, should, or ideally will be: punctilious and attentive to detail, in grammar and in tone; personable with their authors, wide readers, fast readers; politically savvy, especially in the larger houses; sensitive to cultural shifts but loyal to the text; possessed of some degree of business nous. In other words, the editor is a kind of polymath. That professional managerial culture, in all its departmentalization and political quackery, no longer champions the polymath, renders the editor—a really, truly good editor—rare and invaluable.
Shaved ice is prominent in many cuisines, from milky Korean bingsu to New Orleans’s beloved sno-balls. There really isn’t a consistent definition of a “Texas snow cone,” though, at least in terms of texture — but the lack of purism here means that variety is what defines the Texas cone.
Every morning I stumble upstairs with a cup of coffee in the dark so that I can start the work of fiction while still dreaming. My inner editor has a voice like Grace Paley’s, wry and skeptical, and it’s best that she remains asleep while the work is still tender. I close the door in my study, which is the room where my younger son spent his babyhood. His own newborn dreams still drift like jellyfish across the walls; all I have to do is reach out a hand to touch one sliding by. When I sit down, I pick up my tiger’s eye mala. I can’t see it there in the dark, but it is cool to my hand, and the noise the beads make when I lift them is drowsy. I meditate on the beads, my breath sending me deeper into my dream state, but now I’m lucid and in control. When I reach the tassel, the scenes I am working on that day have somehow opened up to me in my subconscious, where the true work of writing is done.
AI is not evil, believes Alegre, but it has no moral compass. Guiding the direction of “scientific endeavour” to safeguard human rights is up to us as sentient beings. There is nothing inevitable about where we are going. We have a choice.
A building is not, of course, a living thing but buildings can die, and a fascinating, indeed haunting, new book offers us a graveyard in black and white.