Tag: better part
Jaime Herrera Beutler’s Lasting Regret
Among the things Jaime Herrera Beutler remembers about January 6, 2021, is that her husband managed to turn off the television just in time.
He was at home with their three young children in southwestern Washington State when the riot began. It had taken him a few moments to make out the shaky footage of the mob as it tore through the Capitol. Then he started to recognize the hallways, the various corridors that he knew led to the House
Of Course Instant Groceries Don’t Work
More than 20 years ago, as the rubble of the dot-com boom was still smoking, Wired magazine published an autopsy of the grocery-delivery start-up Webvan. The company had just filed for bankruptcy after evaporating the better part of a billion dollars of investment funds in about a year and a half, and the tale of its downfall opens with a sentence that, in retrospect, is pretty funny: “In the sober days of 2001, it’s hard to imagine a time when
Two Editors Who Showed What Publishing Should Be
Amid the many controversies that have occurred in American book publishing, I still measure the industry by the people who showed me what it could be at its best. For the better part of my 30-plus years as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf, I sat in an office next to Sonny Mehta, the former head of our company. He hired me, and over time we became great friends. When I spoke at his memorial at the New York