Author: Andrew Sullivan

Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch has sold over a million copies and won a Pulitzer, but it’s failed to win over many high-minded critics. (James Wood, for example: “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”) Evgenia Peretz considers the chasm between grimacing critics and the readers who made the book a bestseller:

[W]e might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial Harper’s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone.

Similarly, [Paris Review editor Loris] Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way.

“What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Jason Diamond expands on Stein’s remarks:

While I ultimately agree with Stein on that point, I wonder about the people buying one or two books a year. Should the books they read next hinge on whether or not the purchase helps to prop up a power dynamic that places “literary lions” in a binary opposition against the rest of the book-buying world? Are things that dire? Does it really take one bad experience to turn them off to fiction forever? And shouldn’t it give us hope that people who are only buying one book a year might be picking up Donna Tartt instead of, say, Dan Brown?

I get that some critics don’t love The Goldfinch. Yet the fact that this one book’s popularity among readers can cause so much controversy exposes not just how little the public pays attention to what we perceive to be “highbrow” literary criticism, but also that American literature is in a really awkward place in which the reputation of a popular, Pulitzer-winning novel is at stake simply because a few critics at a handful of highbrow publications didn’t like it. If this conversation represents where we’re at, what we read, what we like, and who should help guide us toward new titles, then something is seriously amiss.

Christopher Mims thinks not:

The central problems with the Fire, the factors that will kill its sales as surely as they have held Windows Phone to single digit market share in North America, are these:

1. People are loath to switch from the phones they already have, and in the process abandon all the apps and media they’ve bought.

2. The North American market for smartphones–and especially the market for high-end smartphones like the Fire – is heavily saturated, which means there are hardly any new users out there who might adopt the Fire as their first phone.

3. Fire can’t access the existing pool of Android apps. It’s missing critical ones like Uber (Bezos says it’s coming) and Snapchat (no word on when it will appear).

Yglesias worries that the new Fire Phone is too high-end for its own good:

Jeff Bezos’ company has a unique opportunity to come into the smartphone space with a strategy that’s not symmetrical to what other people are doing. Amazon’s phone is first and foremost a physical extension of Amazon-the-store. That argues for a strategy built around a cheap, zero-margin phone that aims to undercut the existing market leaders.

Instead, Amazon seems to be trying to beat the market leaders by adding a bunch of snazzy 3D features to what we’ve come to expect from a high-end smartphone. They’ve even gone out of their way to slightly exceed iPhone 5S specs as far as I can tell. The only price edge Amazon is offering is one year’s worth of Prime membership for free. But this, too, seems backwards. Rather than making Prime a benefit of phone ownership, why not make a cheap phone a benefit of Prime membership?

Manjoo concurs:

For Amazon, a company whose previous devices have had innovative pricing plans that often involved selling devices at cost, the Fire phone’s uninspired price tag is a surprising disappointment. The world needed a great, cheap smartphone.

But Vauhini Vara is tickled by some of the high-end features:

[I]t can do a bunch of charming tricks that are, in fact, like something out of a futuristic “Dick Tracy.” It can change the perspective in games in response to your head movements, make images appear almost as if they were in 3-D (though it isn’t actually 3-D, as some had predicted it would be), and scroll through the content on a Web page – say, a newspaper article – when you tilt it. … People seem to be finding its phone’s newfangled features pretty cool – cool enough, maybe, to get them to switch over from the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies that, after all, haven’t offered much in the way of new whiz-bang gadgetry over the past couple of years.

And Timothy B. Lee believes Amazon made one shrewd move:

The Fire Phone includes an app called Firefly that helps users identify things they point their cameras at, from books to paintings. For some items, Firefly will present useful information, like the Wikipedia page for a famous painting. If it’s an item Amazon sells, Firefly will let you click to buy it.

This should terrify brick and mortar retailers. They have long worried about “showrooming,” the practice where customers will find a product in a physical store (like Best Buy or Home Depot) but then order it from Amazon where the price is lower. Showrooming isn’t new – journalists have been writing trend pieces about it for years. But Firefly promises to make the process effortless.

Alec MacGillis finds it “difficult to envision how Walker would broaden his party’s national appeal beyond the same shrinking pool of voters that Romney drew from”:

Unlike Mitt Romney, or, for that matter, John McCain, he is beloved by the conservative base, but he has the mien of a mainstream candidate, not a favorite of the fringe. His boosters, who include numerous greenroom conservatives in Washington and major donors around the country, such as the Koch brothers, see him as the rare Republican who could muster broad national support without yielding a millimeter on doctrine.

This interpretation of Walker’s appeal could hardly be more flawed. He has succeeded in the sort of environment least conducive to producing a candidate capable of winning a national majority. Over the past few decades, Walker’s home turf of metropolitan Milwaukee has developed into the most bitterly divided political ground in the country—“the most polarized part of a polarized state in a polarized nation,” as a recent series by Craig Gilbert in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel put it.

If that isn’t enough to bring Walker fans down to earth, maybe this news will:

Prosecutors say Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is at the center of a “criminal scheme” to coordinate fundraising with conservative groups across the country, according to documents revealed on Thursday.

The documents were unsealed Thursday by order of a federal judge as part of a lawsuit that sought to block a secret state investigation, known as a “John Doe probe,” into the 2012 gubernatorial recall elections, which the incumbent Walker won. In the filing, the prosecutors say Walker, his chief of staff Keith Gilkes and another top adviser illegally coordinated with national conservative groups and national figures including GOP strategist Karl Rove. Rove’s assistant said he was traveling Thursday and couldn’t comment.

Philip Bump maps the alleged coordination.  Andrew Prokop doesn’t expect charges anytime soon:

Overall, the documents released Thursday provide new information on the case prosecutors sought to make, and what evidence they initially had. But they don’t indicate any new substantive development in the investigation. Until prosecutors get permission from both federal and state courts to use the documents they subpoenaed, charges seem unlikely to be filed.

Chait ponders the political consequences:

The announcement by prosecutors in Wisconsin raises several disconcerting possibilities for a prospective Walker candidacy. The worst possibility is that he will be convicted of running a criminal scheme. A second, less-bad possibility is that he will avoid prosecution, perhaps by Republican judges who see the first Amendment as carte blanche to violate any and all campaign finance laws. This would still create an extended legal battle in which Walker’s name is associated with the “criminal scheme,” a phrase combining two terms which each have a highly negative connotation to most voters. This sort of coverage has caused Christie’s poll numbers to tank even without (yet) facing criminal charges.

Sarah Kliff passes along the finding, from a new Kaiser survey, that a “slim majority of Obamacare’s private insurance enrollees were uninsured when they signed up for coverage.” But other organizations have produced strikingly different results:

Here’s the thing that’s so frustrating in trying to sort out this question about who was uninsured: the variation between different groups’ estimates is just massive. When you dig into the methodology, as health wonks are wont to do, you start to notice that the surveys happened at different times, with different people who were asked different questions. …

The new Kaiser Family Foundation survey is the most up-to-date, randomized study that specifically asks people to identify what coverage source they had prior to signing up on the exchange. This separates it from RAND (whose survey data misses the end of open enrollment), McKinsey (which asks a slightly different question) and the Obama administration estimate (it leaves out anyone buying through a state exchange).

Drum examines the surveys’ methodologies:

The basic problem is that the pool of uninsured has a lot of churn: people are covered for a while, then lose their jobs, then get another job, etc. So if you had insurance last August, but lost your job and signed up for Obamacare in November, do you count as previously uninsured? According to McKinsey, no. According to Kaiser, yes.

My own guess is that the Kaiser methodology is probably the closest of the four to what we’d normally think of as “uninsured,” and its sample size is big enough to be reliable.

Cohn focuses on another aspect of the survey – premium costs:

Strictly among people who had coverage previously, the “winners” (people who say they paying less for insurance now) outnumber the “losers” (people who say they are paying more for insurance now). Specifically, 46 percent of respondents who had insurance before Obamacare said they were spending less on their new monthly premiums, while 39 percent said they were spending more. That’s not much of a difference, given the survey’s margin of error. But it certainly doesn’t suggest, as the law’s opponents frequently claim, that most people are worse off. And when you consider that many people who were buying insurance on their own previously are now getting Medicaid, which is basically free, it would appear that there are clearly more winners than losers, at least when it comes to what people are paying up front for coverage.

Adrianna McIntyre expects premiums will go up next year but at a lower rate than before:

The people who enroll in health insurance in future years are expected to be healthier than the people enrolled today. The penalty for not carrying insurance is modest this year: $95 or 1 percent of income for an individual, whichever’s higher. That gets scaled up over the next few years, compelling more people to purchase insurance.

The people who declined to sign up for insurance — and pay the penalty instead — are probably healthy; had they been uninsured and sick, they would have taken advantage of new coverage options under Obamacare. As these healthier people enroll in coverage, the average health of the insured population gets better, and insurance gets cheaper.

Recent Dish on Obamacare’s costs here.