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In a recent address at the first annual conference of the pro-life student group Choose Life at Yale, Tristyn Bloom suggested that “the reason people continue to defend abortion is because, essentially, of existential terror: fear of what will happen when something unexpected, uninvited, unplanned bursts into our lives demanding action”:

We often hear that a problem with young people today is that we are irresponsible. We don’t have a sense of duty. We don’t have a sense of order. We’re immature. I think that the problem is actually the opposite. I think that we are pathologically terrified of risk and I think that we have this enslavement to our own ideas of respectability, our own ideas of our life plan, our commitments, our existing duties such that something as radically changing as a new life doesn’t fit in with those existing duties. To accept that life would be the irresponsible choice, and that’s the framework from which a lot of people are operating. They see themselves as accepting consequences, as responsible. They have a semblance of a moral framework and we can’t ignore that just because it’s completely the opposite of our own. And this isn’t just about whether or not you accept a child. I think that we are so enslaved to a plan, and a routine, and a vision of our lives, we can’t embrace the unsettledness, openness, flexibility, and folly it takes to have an actually pro-life culture in every instance.

Josh W., a Catholic blogger, expands on Bloom’s point:

[U]tilitarianism … has come to define propriety and social mores, at least to a certain extent… . Actions have costs, benefits and risks, and the ethical choice is one which takes that into account. Having lots of of kids, for instance, is frowned upon because it is seen as being both personally and socially irresponsible.

But this is also a vision of life that becomes progressively divorced from meaning. It’s the sort of “healthy” ho-hum bourgeoisie existence that Friedrich Nietzche had a panic over. And this is why I have a sympathy for counter-cultural sorts, weirdos and the like, even if they’re doing something I’d consider stupid or evil; because there is an acknowledgement of the enervating and sterile aspect of modernity and a desire for spontaneity. That is what makes the beatniks and hippies fascinating, because they correctly recognized the meaninglessness of the world they grew up in and reacted against it. They went for the wrong medicine and ironically wound up having bits and pieces of their own ethos assimilated back into the mainstream, but they had some awareness.

Dreher adds questions to the debate:

I hadn’t thought of the pro-life issue this way — that a culture of life can’t take root in a culture that is terrified of making a single mistake that would ostensibly ruin one’s life.

On the other hand, it can’t be denied that having a baby out of wedlock really does, in most cases, have a significant impact on the economic prospects of their mothers. What is the difference? A middle-class support system? What?

Update from a reader:

Jesus H. Christ, talk about an ivory tower. “The reason people continue to defend abortion is because, essentially, of existential terror… We can’t embrace the unsettledness, openness, flexibility, and folly it takes to have an actually pro-life culture in every instance.”

If I were just a bit more spontaneous, I’d agree that it’s the role of the state to force a person to keep something unwanted inside them! Gosh! I need to live a little! Thanks, Ms Bloom!

Pro-choice can be pro-life. Repeat that over and over, because it’s true. Pro-choice simply means that when it’s not me affected, I cannot make the decision.

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Katy Waldman ponders what effects increased life expectancy is having on the idea of childhood and what to anticipate “for kids when adults are living to 120 and beyond”:

Besides the likelihood that they will have lots of potential caretakers (or at least endure a borderline inhumane number of cheek pinches at Thanksgiving), they may be seen as even more rare and precious. Society will skew older. The years before puberty will represent an ever-smaller proportion of the overall lifespan. We can speculate that, for a certain income bracket, the cult of childhood will become yet cultier, the cocoons at once softer and more anxiously woven. …

But who even counts (or will count) as a “kid”?

And what happens to the limbo period between childhood and adulthood, dependence and autonomy, when time approaches the status of a renewable resource? “There’s always been a tension in American history between absolute chronological age and maturation,” says Susan A. Miller, a professor of childhood studies at Rutgers. “Age has historically been far less relevant than what someone is able to accomplish.” In the 18th century, she continues, a boy who developed quickly, growing strong and tall, was considered ready for a man’s work. A century later, before industrialization took hold, it was not uncommon for 17-year-olds to graduate from Harvard, to go west, to edit city newspapers. Now, that haziness around age versus competence seems to be going in the other direction. Modern young people are testing the limits not of how swiftly they can plunge into adulthood, but of how long they can delay it.

Humans burn about one million barrels of oil a day searching for parking spaces, according to Greg Rucks and Laura Guevara-Stone. They propose a new approach:

Smart parking pilot programs are now being deployed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Beijing, Shanghai, São Paulo, and the Netherlands. For example, in Los Angeles, low-power sensors and smart meters track the occupancy of parking spaces throughout the Hollywood district, one of its most congested areas. Users can access that occupancy data to determine the availability of spots and then pay for them with their mobile phones. In addition to lending convenience and environmental benefits, smart parking improves the utilization of existing parking, leading to greater revenue for parking owners. Los Angeles saw a return on its investment in smart parking within three months.

Why the time is right:

The costs of sensors and hardware-based solutions is decreasing drastically, for the first time allowing cities and companies to gather detailed new data on transportation patterns. Furthermore, with smart phones capturing more and more of the global telecommunications market in both developing and developed nations, software entrepreneurs are able to collect and analyze data and deliver insights and information to consumers in brand new ways that do not require installation of new hardware.

For example, Roadify started in 2009 as a free app that helped New York City residents find parking spaces. Users enter the address of a spot that they are about to leave or of an open spot that they happen to walk by, earning points known as Street Carma (users can later cash in that Carma to redeem rewards). Other users nearby will see that spot on the app if they search the area. The app has since expanded to cities nationwide and now provides real-time transit information about schedules, delays, accidents, and more from crowd-sourced commentary about local transit conditions.

Previous Dish on the future of parking here, here, and here.

He yells, she smiles… "@daveweigel: And the rally ends, inevitably, with Christie arguing with a teacher pic.twitter.com/KeqF1GU3PX"

— Brian Kelly (@HiwayBK) November 3, 2013

Drum suspects that Christie’s personality will be a liability:

Something that seems sort of cute when it’s just Jersey—and when it’s something you vaguely hear about third hand—would sink you if you were running for president. I guarantee you that the American public will very quickly become repelled at the sight of a Jersey loudmouth bullying ordinary citizens who have the temerity to disagree with him.

So the question is, can Christie control himself? Or will he lose his temper one too many times during a grueling, sleepless primary campaign? Since “one too many times” is quite possibly “once,” my money says he doesn’t stand much of a chance.

Barro rolls his eyes:

Why do national reporters so often talk about New Jersey as if its electorate consisted entirely of Teresa Giudice and The Situation?

New Jersey is one of the best-educated, highest-income, most upscale states in the country. We don’t associate Greenwich, Conn., with loudmouths; why would we expect them to play especially well in Saddle River, N.J.? Demographically, New Jersey is basically similar to Massachusetts, but with slightly higher incomes and somewhat more racial diversity. Like New Jersey, Massachusetts has townies. But when Massachusetts politicians run for national office, reporters don’t pull out “Good Will Hunting” and fret that the local pols are “too Massachusetts” to sell nationally.

The truth is that Christie’s style is less specific to New Jersey than most people (including Christie) would have you think.

A New Jersey reader responds to our earlier post on Christie:

All of you pundits can love Chris Christie as much as you want and you can push him for president, but just remember, he is running against an absolute nobody, a sacrificial lamb who is not someone for Christie to be worried about. And yet, he started advertising against Barbara Buono the minute she became the nominee. The fact that Obama never came here to campaign for her is telling. Even the emails I get from DNC’s Organizing for America don’t mention her. They only encouraged me to vote for the raise in the minimum wage and vote Democratic down ticket.

Christie knew from the get-go that the campaign had nothing to do with Buono; he wanted to run up the numbers so that he looked better as a potential presidential candidate. But how he portrays himself doesn’t match up with who he is politically; he is anti-abortion; he is against marriage equality (I think that the only reason he is for civil unions is because in this blue state, he HAS to be); and he wants even more tax cuts for the 1% (though he will never say so out loud). My property taxes continue to rise, my homestead rebate has disappeared, the schools have worsened, and while he was great when the shore was first battered by Sandy, he’s been absent until the later days of the campaign.

Christie wants to be president. There is no question about it. And what scares me is that I know zero about his Lieutenant Governor (probably my fault). He will stay here in the Garden State until he has to leave to run. Can he be elected president? I don’t know. He is the first member of the GOP I even considered voting for in forever. But I would never vote for him for president, mostly because of the people (Koch, Ailes, Rove and others) to whom he will be beholden. But he is the closest thing to a viable candidate they have at the moment.

Marriage equality is fast gaining support in … South Carolina:

There’s a fascinating new poll number out of South Carolina that tells you everything you need to know about where the politics of same-sex marriage in the country are headed and why Republicans need to be very careful with how they handle the issue in the coming years. The number is 52 percent — as in the percentage of  South Carolinians who believe that marriages between same-sex couples should not be recognized under law, according to a new Winthrop University poll conducted for The State newspaper. But, consider this: In 2006, the Palmetto State passed a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage with 78 percent of the vote.

I remember going to Columbia, South Carolina, to give a speech about marriage equality at some point in the late 1990s. I was trepidatious, to say the least, but thrilled to be invited into the lion’s den. At one point, I remember asking one of the organizers for her fax number – yes, I know! – so I could send some materials. She nearly had a conniption. If she got a fax about gay marriage at her company, it would be curtains for her, she said (put that in the pro-ENDA column, if you’re counting). So all the organizing had to be done in secret or in code.

But when I got there, the crowd was huge, and the reception intense. The thing about gays is that we are randomly distributed across the country with each generation. That means there are many, many gays in the South – and they are not isolated from wider cultural trends. They tend to be more conservative, which is why the marriage and military fights brought them more into the fold of the national struggle. So I’m not too surprised by anecdotal evidence of peer-to-peer toleration, even if the public debate at the elite level is still so harsh. But then I think that goes for the whole debate: the political leadership is way behind the popular shift.

Josh Marshall reflects on how far we’ve come:

Now it’s hard to say what the most conservative state in the country is. Idaho and Wyoming conservatism is different from Deep South conservatism. And earlier this year Nate Silver used various statistical evidence to argue that either Alabama or Mississippi would be the last states to give way on equality. But South Carolina is about as conservative as states come, especially in terms of the fundamentalist bible-drenched brand of conservatism which is the sheet anchor of hardcore opposition to same sex marriage.

And yet even here, likely within a few years, support for same sex marriage will likely be the majority position. That’s great for full civic equality. But it’s perilous for the political fortunes of equality opponents. Remember, just today John Boehner announced that he opposed the ENDA workplace civil rights bill, even though it’s sailing through the Senate. That looks to soon be a minority and just as importantly politically and generationally isolating position.

Greg Sargent makes similar points about ENDA. The bill is cruising through the Senate:

[T]he Senate voted 61 to 30 to advance the legislation. Unexpectedly, seven Republicans voted with the majority, and the number might have been higher had nine members not missed the vote.

In an interesting twist, 30 Republicans backed the filibuster, but not one was willing to deliver remarks against ENDA. The same thing happened in committee, when most of the GOP senators opposed the bill, but none was willing to say a word. It’s a reminder that we’ve reached a fascinating point in the larger debate – Republicans don’t want expand protections against discrimination, but they’re reluctant to defend their position out loud.

Beutler puts the GOP House’s opposition to ENDA in context:

[T]he political logic of leaning on the House is solid, even if it doesn’t result in substantive accomplishments. It clarifies who the villain is. Like a game of Clue, but with a single culprit, crime scene and weapon. The GOP, in the House, with the speaker’s gavel. … Big Senate bills in and of themselves won’t shake House Republicans out of their paralysis. It’s unrealistic to expect the House will address all of these issues and it’s possible they won’t address any of them. But the constituent groups to whom these issues matter — Latinos, the LGBT community, women, African-Americans and young people — won’t be confused about who killed them.

If the GOP doesn’t adjust, it’s doomed. Even at some point, in the South.

It’s his father, Rafael Cruz. One of Rafael’s many insane rants, which David Corn reported on last week:

A Ted Cruz spokesman claims that these “selective quotes, taken out of context, mischaracterize the substance of Pastor Cruz’s message.” Corn thinks that response isn’t going to cut it:

Does Ted Cruz believe it’s a joke to accuse the president of trying to destroy God? Or that his father was kidding when he suggested Obama is “wicked,” asserted that the president is attempting to “destroy American exceptionalism,” said he wants government to be God, and insisted that “social justice is a cancer”? As for attacking the son with the father’s statements, the senator did not explain why it’s unfair to hold him accountable for remarks made by a person Cruz’s campaign routinely deployed as an official surrogate. According to campaign disclosure records, Cruz’s Senate campaign paid Rafael Cruz about $10,000 in traveling expenses in 2012 and 2013. And in August the conservative National Review noted that the father-son duo had forged a “political partnership,” reporting: “Cruz has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick.” Put it this way: Rafael Cruz is far closer to Ted Cruz and his political endeavors than Jeremiah Wright was to Obama and his campaigns.

What I find fascinating about the Cruzes is that they really do have a unified Christianist-Tea-Party worldview.

Rafael Cruz is a Dominionist, who believes that America is a Christian (not a Judeo-Christian) nation, and that its laws should be a version of Christian sharia, not secular arrangements for a diverse society. Ted Cruz, for his part, wants to shred the post-FDR safety net, balance the budget now, even during a lingering depression, and return to a bare-bones federal government that he believes was the intent of the Founders. Both are fundamentalists with fundamentalist texts: the entire Bible, including the Old Testament, and the Constitution as viewed by Americans more than two centuries ago. Both these belief-systems are responses, it seems to me, to the bewildering complexity of modern life, the globalized economy, and resentment of the claims of the poor and sick and needy. And for these very reasons, they are absolute and rigid. In a time of widespread economic distress, they are also very potent populist appeals to an imagined past that was once simple, Christian and just.

They are best seen, to my mind, as prophets, not pols. Only a prophet would risk throwing the entire world economy into a second Great Depression, shutting down the federal government, and wrecking the credit of the United States in order to protest a duly enacted law. But prophets are dangerous in politics – and Cruz is a very gifted demagogue. He was, after all, brought up by one.

Readers push back against my very qualified support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act:

Huge fan, and now subscriber. But you’re looking at the ENDA question all wrong. It isn’t about how many successful suits are filed under ENDA or any other hate crime law. The point of a law is not to prove how many “notches on a bedpost” can be achieved; it’s to stop the behavior before it ever occurs. So the next time management wants to do something to a gay employee, they stop, think twice, and the issue … never becomes an issue. Perhaps the employee will never even know it happened. We may never be able to put a number on this, so critics may always be able to say “look, this law is hardly ever used, so there was never a problem!” But for gay employees across the country to be able to sleep a little easier at night, it’s worth it.

The problem is: how can the need for any law therefore be analyzed? If there are no law suits, it works; if there are loads of law suits, it works.  Heads you win; tails you win. And freedom is nitpicked and nitpicked. Here’s a better response:

I volunteer with GLAD Answers, formerly the GLAD Legal Infoline, which provides legal information, assistance, and referrals for LGBTQ and HIV+ people in New England, and also flags cases that GLAD itself might be interested in taking on as impact litigation.  Now, New England is a pretty liberal region, so a lot of people assume there’s no employment discrimination problem here, but we actually get a decent number of calls and emails from people in this situation – last time I saw the numbers, well over a hundred in the previous year.  If you’re interested I can try get some recent numbers.  That’s just the people who contacted GLAD rather than start the legal process themselves or resign themselves and keep quiet/move on.  We get a lot more employment discrimination calls than we do housing or public accommodations discrimination.

If people want to pursue these cases, they generally involve going through a state anti-discrimination agency.  In my state, Massachusetts, the relevant agency is MCAD. According to MCAD’s 2012 (pdf) and 2011 (pdf) annual reports, they had 115 sexual orientation complaints filed with them in 2012 and 130 in 2011.  As 83% (2012) and 84% (2011) of all their complaints were about employment discrimination, it’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of the sexual-orientation-based complaints were about employment discrimination. This is in liberal Massachusetts!

These numbers also don’t include discrimination against trans people, as protections for them weren’t passed in Massachusetts until mid-2012.  The plurality of those cases, by the way, end up being settled through MCAD mediation.  This doesn’t mean that the laws aren’t having an effect – if there was no law, MCAD wouldn’t be involved to mediate.

I can’t imagine having to tell callers that what happened to them was perfectly legal, that they have no legal recourse.  We’re fortunate here in New England that all of our states prohibit employment discrimination for sexual orientation, and all but New Hampshire prohibit it for gender identity.  Even though I am skeptical about ENDA’s ability to pass the House right now, I feel very strongly that the fight for it needs to keep going and stay strong (and come on, Gay, Inc over the last few years has been consumed with marriage equality more than anything else).

It’s also worth noting that employment protections for trans and gender non-conforming people are really important, as such a high percentage experience workplace discrimination and harassment – check out the National Transgender Discrimination Survey here.

Another:

A point you could have picked up on, but didn’t: It may be true that 88% of Fortune 500 companies have non-discrimination policies, but they are, increasingly, a smaller proportion of the workforce. As you yourself have found through the new independent Dish, a lot of Americans are going it alone or working for businesses that are much, much smaller. As I understand the numbers, Fortune 500 status is based on revenues, not employee numbers, so you have anomalies like Spectrum Group International, an $8 billion company ranked #331, but with only 190 employees.  There are far more people working for small companies – those with less than $4.8 billion in revenues, the cutoff point this year for Fortune 500 status – who are much  less likely to have employer-sponsored protection. ENDA would help them. Some may still choose to move on rather than fight to work in a hostile environment, but at least then it becomes a choice.

Another:

I have another reason why it is now very important to enact ENDA. It would help with the implementation of same-sex marriage. Given attitudes and personal considerations, many gay people remain closeted or semi-closeted at work.  However, entering into a lawful same-sex marriage would automatically out you to an employer.  This would occur because tax withholding and employer provided health insurance (and some other benefits) are partially dependent on marital status.

This is not a big deal if your employer is supportive or if you have legal protections. With regard to the legal protections and prior to this year, all of the U.S. jurisdictions with same-sex marriage had previously enacted a sexual orientation inclusive employment nondiscrimination law.  That changed with the Windsor case.  Despite not forbidding sexual orientation-based employment discrimination under federal statute, the national government will now recognize a same-sex marriage.  This lack of federal protection is not a huge problem if you and your spouse live and work in any of the 21 states that address this issue through state law.  But if you live in or work  in the other 29 states, you could be forced to out yourself to a hostile employer, without any legal protection, when setting up your withholding or  signing up for insurance.

While this issue might only concern a comparatively small number of married gay couples in the next year or so, it will certainly grow.  Several of the states (e.g. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Virginia) that lack gay inclusive nondiscrimination protections are facing lawsuits to overturn their same-sex marriage bans.  A blanket level of national protection (ENDA) is going to be a major help in successfully implementing same-sex marriage. Otherwise, I fear that we are going to see gay couples getting married in some states only to be fired by their anti-gay employers.

That may well be the case. My own view is that the marriage debate – which got to the core of gay equality and dignity – has shifted attitudes so as to make this bill seem relatively anodyne. But my reader is right that there’s a virtuous cycle in the dynamic between both reforms.

Yesterday’s Dish on the positive case for ENDA here.

Sean Trende puts the coming Christie landslide in perspective:

If Christie matches his current numbers in the RCP Average, he would have the fourth-best showing of any Republican in the state in the post-World War II era. Only Sen. Clifford Case in his 1972 re-election, Dwight Eisenhower in the 1956 presidential re-election, and Gov. Tom Kean Sr. in his 1985 re-election put up better numbers.

He adds that “Chris Christie is easily the most conservative politician elected to statewide office in New Jersey in the past 60 years, and possibly longer”:

The normal Republican blueprint in the Northeast is to run as a center-right candidate on fiscal matters and center-left — if not left — on social issues (remember, Christine Todd Whitman opposed a ban on partial-birth abortions). On fiscal matters, Christie has been pretty hawkish, taking on the state’s teachers’ unions, overseeing cuts in spending and lowering taxes. Even on social issues, he has been fairly conservative, especially by Northeastern standards — he’s pro-life, against gay marriage (though he does support civil unions), and he even cut state funding for Planned Parenthood. This is an unusually conservative overall profile for a successful Republican politician in the region, much less for one of the most successful Republican politicians there in a generation.

Nate Cohn warns that it “would be extremely misguided to assume that conservative Republicans can simply jettison guns and immigration and routinely win blue states”:

But that doesn’t justify discounting Christie, either.

After all, Republicans don’t need to win New Jersey to win the presidency. They mainly need to hold down Democratic margins in areas that aren’t too different from New Jersey, like the well-educated and diverse suburbs around Philadelphia, Washington, Columbus, and Denver. The sheer margin by which Christie is surpassing what’s necessary is consistent with the possibility that even modest changes would be enough for a sufficient number of moderate voters to reconsider a Republican candidate.

There’s a historical precedent: Bill Clinton. He was ostensibly a “New Democrat,” even though he was pro-choice, supported higher taxes, a universal health care system, gun control, and expanded rights for gays in the military. Rather than abandon core elements of the Democratic agenda, Clinton softened the edges on unreformed welfare, crime, middle class taxes, and said abortion should be “rare,” even if it should remain legal.

Today’s “New Republican” might not look very different from Chris Christie.

Jonathan Tobin is skeptical that other Republicans can follow Christie’s example:

It needs to be understood that despite all the talk about Christie’s centrism, much of that has more to do with atmospherics than political principles. New Jersey Democrats have been complaining for years that Christie is actually quite conservative, and they’re right. Far from being the poster child for “No Labels” centrism, Christie has been willing to work with Democrats in Trenton but mostly on his terms. If he has become the bête noire of GOP conservatives it’s been because of his embrace of President Obama after Hurricane Sandy last year and his attacks on House Republicans over their stalling on an aid bill, not because of any heresy on conservative principle. Both on social issues like abortion and Tea Party core interests like reducing the size of government and fighting the power of unions, Christie fits in well with the rest of his party.

He’s gotten away with it not because citizens of the Garden State think he’s a closet liberal but because of the appeal of his personality and governing style. It’s an open question as to whether that brusque approach will play as well on the national stage as it has in New Jersey. But suffice it to say that I doubt a Republican looking to have that success in a different sort of state could use the same playbook. Though pundits will search for one, there’s no point looking for another Christie.

McKay Coppins makes similar points:

In a way, this is the biggest dilemma facing the RNC’s outreach efforts: there’s only one Christie. If the GOP wants to win races with a more racially diverse electorate, it will have to figure out how to sell candidates who don’t have the magnetism of a cult leader and the ideological flexibility of a blue state Republican. What’s more, if the party truly wants to rebrand itself among minority voters, Republicans will need strong, appealing standard-bearers who voters come to associate with the GOP. That’s easier said than done.

(Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty.)

Last week the company launched Day One, a weekly literary journal “dedicated to short fiction from debut writers, English translations of stories from around the world, and poetry.” Todd Wasserman highlights the first issue:

[It] appeared Wednesday with the short story “Sheila” by Rebecca Adams Wring and “Wrought,” a poem by Zach Strait. Each issue will also include a note from the editor introducing the writer and poet, along with bonus content like playlists, interviews with the authors and illustrations.

Day One is Amazon’s latest attempt to become a content creator rather than merely a distributor. The company has also recently launched its own TV programming through Amazon Prime. Over the summer, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos independently purchased The Washington Post for $250 million.

Liz Bury gauges the reaction of the publishing community:

[Literary fiction publisher Simon Prosser] welcomed Amazon’s initiative saying “the more ventures trying to get good writing out there, the better”. … “They seem to have chosen young, hip-looking people for the first edition,” said Neill Denny, who is chief operating officer of Read Petite, an online short fiction and non-fiction subscription service…. “For the young end of the literary market — the smartphone generation — it could work. It would be churlish not to welcome an attempt to build an audience for short literary fiction. It’s a noble aspiration.”

Jacob Kastrenakes notes the peculiarity of the new project, as literary journals “aren’t usually seen as being among the more profitable ventures out there”:

Amazon is initially offering a yearly subscription for $9.99, and though it’ll later be raised up to $19.99, at either price Amazon will be significantly undercutting the cost of most highly regarded literary journals, which largely don’t have the resources Amazon does to allow them to operate at such a low cost.

But while price is a war that Amazon can easily fight and win, quality will be its biggest battle. Because literary journals are publishing different authors every issue, they’re generally regarded by the quality of work that they’re able to bring in — with quality work bringing about further quality work down the road. If Amazon can begin to curate and publish quality content in its journal, it could also help to bolster the company’s own literary publishing imprint, Little A, which so far has just over a dozen novels to its name.

“As if they weren’t already making enough money,” snaps the anti-Amazon Dustin Kurtz:

As to why the company might have decided to start a literary journal, the only thought that comes to me is that it’s either a vanity project for someone, a charm offensive (emphasis on offensive) akin to the company’s grants to various magazines and literary organizations, or, again, they may have been motivated by the towering cliffs of cash this thing will bring them. Really. So much money.

A baffled Tom Cheredar suspects that “for now, all we can really say is that the company is definitely playing a long game.”