Masters of Unreality

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/22/masters-of-unreality/
August 22, 2019

The latest ploy of the anti-Trump media phalanx and their weekly echo chamber of assorted Democratic candidates and legislators, is to try to move the voter-approval needle by insisting an economic recession is about to occur. The problem is, it isn’t.

As weeks pass without a recession or even increasing objective statistical hints of a recession, the continued trumpeting of a recession becomes self-stifling. Not even the economically illiterate mouthpieces of CNN and MSNBC can keep a straight face for long predicting recession when there are no signs it is happening.

It is possible to convince those who want to be convinced that something happening completely in the dark, such as trade negotiations with China, is going badly. (They aren’t.) But is impossible to maintain a levitation of economic alarm when confidence remains high, employers are hiring rather than laying off workers, and economic growth, unemployment, and inflation numbers remain positive.

Understandably, it has been difficult for both sides on the political see-saw as we approach the 2020 election year. President Trump’s enemies, clinging as they have been since the beginning to buoyant flotsam, are like people who have been cast into the sea and can’t swim.

A Blizzard of Subpoenas—and a Looming I.G. Report

The idea of a Trump presidency was so unthinkable there could not be a honeymoon because it could not be real; it could not have been a legitimate election. For more than two years we were waiting for the confirmation that Trump had worked with the Russian government to rig the election.

We now know that from the start the investigators knew that there had been no such collusion and almost two whole years were spent trying to provoke Trump into counter-attacking Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s operation so he could be accused of obstructing justice. Since the president cooperated with the inquiry even as he rightly denounced it as a hoax and a fraud, the best that could be done was an invitation to the House of Representatives to continue investigations so Democrats might keep the impeachment cloud over the president’s head.

Doubtless when legislators return from their summer recess, like two spavined old fire-horses, judiciary and intelligence committee chairmen Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) will storm out of the gate again, issuing subpoenas which will be ignored by the administration, and relying on the same desperately inadequate choir of nasty media sorcerers (down to and including Watergate catacomb mythmakers Carl Bernstein and John Dean), to stoke it up one more time.

It won’t fly. No one believes any of it. Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz will soon produce his report on many aspects of the spurious Trump-Russia investigation, and Senator Linsdsey Graham (R-S.C.) and his judiciary committee will take it from there, shouldering Nadler and Schiff out of the frame.

Inexorably, as special prosecutor John Durham’s indictments come down, the Democrats’ “insurance policy” against Trump (the Russian collusion canard as described by former FBI senior agent Peter Strzok) will become the Democrats’ suicide weapon.

“Concentration Camps” and Other Illusions

Russia was hastily followed by racism, topped out with attempts to hold Trump in some way responsible for the tragic shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Since Trump isn’t a racist, and neither of the two shooters professed any Trump role in forming their psychopathic opinions, that wheeze has died in the summer heat. It is to be hoped that it doesn’t take down prudent bipartisan reforms of the gun regime with it.

The sudden and mysterious silence that has enshrouded the southern border, including the wailings of Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), is the surest indicator that the fence is being built, Mexico is cooperating (as it receives more manufacturing investment from companies fleeing China over tariffs), and the detention and adjudication system with hundreds of new judges, is working. The number of apprehensions of those attempting to enter illegally is declining and it is becoming very difficult to represent crowded but adequately sanitary and well-stocked detention centers as the replications of Nazi death camps that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and others were conjuring.

Understanding the Trump-Era Economy

Now we are on to a recession. This claim contains no more substance than the chimeras that preceded it.

The straws in the wind that have been cited as the green shoots of economic calamity are far from dispositive, and carry much less weight than continuing solid performances in economic growth, inflation, absolute and per capita GDP growth, manufacturing jobs growth, shrinkage of minority unemployment, and purchasing power for working and lower middle class families. All of these numbers are coming in supportively for the administration.

The fact that the election approaches and the importance of the economy in electoral results is proverbial, and the serial evaporation of the false issues that have been pinned on Trump in his inexorable elephantine march through his first term, now combine to attempt the incitement of hysteria on this subject.

It is true that the deficit tops $1 trillion and that is not sustainable indefinitely, but that is 35 percent less than the Obama average (admittedly coming after a debacle bequeathed by George W. Bush); and the GDP is about 25 percent above the latter Obama years. So despite a very large tax reduction and a strong defense build-up, the deficit as a percentage of GDP has shrunk in about five years from 8.5 percent to less than 5 percent, unacceptable, but progress.

The most important single measurement, especially for insertion into political predictions, is GDP per capita growth, which declined dangerously from 4.5 percent in the Reagan years to 3.9 percent in the Clinton terms, to 2 percent under George W. Bush to 1 percent with Obama. This trend had to be reversed to prevent extreme economic and political stress.

Economics, essentially, is half psychology and half third-grade arithmetic. Trump has won the arithmetic and there are no serious signs of incipient recession: neither rising interest rates presaging inflation, which could require recessive measures to cool, nor serious slackening of demand.

Under the circumstances, it will be hard for Democratic officials and media fear-mongering to win the psychological battle over the direct personal experience and observations of the voters.

Dangers Abroad, Increasing Strength at Home

The only signs of economic weakness are from other important countries. The European Union appears to be about to suffer the grievous self-inflicted wound of failing to reach a reasonable compromise with the UK, and the loss of its second-largest national economy and most prestigious member. This would be a benefit to the United States as a free trade agreement with the world’s fifth-largest economy would be eminently negotiable.

China, despite its huffing and puffing and the solicitude for its “face” it has stirred up in the weak-kneed precincts of the over-populated anti-Trump world, is sputtering and losing jobs to Vietnam, India, and Mexico. Those who have been so prostrated in their hostility to the president that they have subscribed to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s “Belt and Road” hegemonic plan will suffer the disconcertion of seeing China adopt a sharp course correction.

The comparative weakness of China’s rivals will assist the prolongation of the American boom, which only seems so protracted because there never really was a full recovery under Obama, little more than stabilization with a 125 percent increase in accumulated national debt in eight years. The workforce shrank, welfare dependency rose, and a flat-lined “new normal” that the country could not live with was proclaimed.

The Democrats and their media are trying to delay the sober and balanced assessment of the merits of the candidates coming up to the 2020 election. To repurpose a beloved Democratic expression, the inconvenient truth is that Trump has been a good president who has kept his promises.

Mr. Mercedes Review: David E. Kelley Takes A Disturbingly Fun Ride With Stephen King

By Nick Venable
https://www.cinemablend.com/television/1689479/mr-mercedes-review-david-e-kelley-takes-a-disturbingly-fun-ride-with-stephen-king
August 2017


Brendan Gleeson and Harry Treadway

The Dark Tower just recently hit theaters, Spike's The Mist is heading towards its Season 1 finale, and IT's Pennywise will rush through Derry's pipes soon. With more adaptations just beyond the horizon, Stephen King's imagination is alive and well in pop culture, and it's quite possible the best of the bunch is currently hurtling towards audiences. With Audience Network's Mr. Mercedes, legal TV juggernaut David E. Kelley and an A+ cast trade in King's traditional horror for his pulpy crime drama, and the results are as deliciously dark and twisted and fun as fans could've hoped. Perhaps delicious is the wrong word...

A cat-and-mouse dance between the psyches of its protagonist and antagonist -- both polar opposites, save for a shared sense of world-weary fatigue -- Mr. Mercedes hides neither its cat nor its mouse from audiences, clearly uninterested in tethering its story to stock shocks and baffling twists. David E. Kelley and his creative team want viewers to know two things very, very well: what it's like to be inside the alcohol-addled brain of retired detective Bill Hodges, played to perfection by the ever-laudable Brendan Gleeson, and what it's like to be inside the migraine-addled brain of tech-savvy killer Brady Hartsfield, portrayed by a most sinister Harry Treadaway. Spoiler alert: one of those brains is much more disturbing than the other.

The series begins in the same way as the novel does, with a flashback centered on a crowd of people waiting in line falling victim to a thrill kill motorist using a vehicle as his weapon. The heinous brutality of the murders is made all the more disturbing by top notch direction from Kelley familiar Jack Bender, as well as a handful of similar real-life events in recent months. And in the show's present-day reality, the "Mr. Mercedes" case is still unsolved, which factors largely into Hodges' sour moods, as well as his thirst for whatever's most potent.

But while Hodges' social awkwardness with his amorous neighbor Ida (Holland Taylor) is about as good as it gets for his personality, his mental state fractures anew when he starts receiving horrifying messages from the Mr. Mercedes killer. As the episodes go on, viewers start to learn just how obsessive he got about solving the case when it was fresh, as well how quickly he's able to fall right back into that obsession, much to the dismay of his former partner, Det. Peter Dixon (Legion's Scott Lawrence). Brendan Gleeson embodies every bit of the Bill Hodges that Stephen King first put to paper, and TV audiences are all the better for witnessing his judgment-spewing jaunt to live-action.

Hodges is the equivalent of every stereotypical older person who doesn't understand technology, so when he first starts getting messages from his former nemesis (of sorts), Hodges enlists the assistance of his Internet-mentored yard-mower Jerome, played by Moonlight's Jharrel Jerome. While the episodes available for review didn't bring Jerome too deeply into Hodges' mission just yet, their kinship is as naturally uneven as one should be between a teenager and a retiree, and its development should be excellent. Mary Louise Parker enters the story as Janey, the sister of the woman who owned the Mercedes used to run down those initial victims, and Hodges also enlists her mind (and body) in re-attempting to crack the case.

Which brings us to the titular killer, a multi-talented and antisocial chap whose childhood was tailor-made to one day produce an emotionally stunted and bloodthirsty murderer. Coming off a winning turn as Victor Frankenstein on Penny Dreadful, Harry Treadaway inhabits some troublingly grim places as Brady Hartsfield, and Mr. Mercedes interestingly doesn't vilify Brady as often as other dramas might. (Not that his heinous actions are celebrated.) Brady's skills make him a perfect IT tech for a local electronics store, where he deals with an overbearing boss (Robert Stanton) and finds a unexpected and meaningful friendship with his coworker Lou (Breeda Wool). And because this is Stephen King, Brady also drives an ice cream truck around the neighborhoods as a side gig with ulterior motives.

But Brady isn't so much a workaholic as he is the lone surviving Hartsfield male left to get loved on by his mother Deborah, played by Kelly Lynch. That's a softcore way of hinting at the scandalous things that have gone on inside their family home, usually after Deborah drank all the clear liquor in the freezer, and while Brady is dealing with one of his attention-thwarting headaches. As such, Brady keeps himself busy outside of Deborah's reach, spending most of his home time scheming all top-secret-like in the basement.

There's sympathy to be found here, though almost completely for those whose lives Brady has ruined, and while viewers can easily understand that he is a also a victim -- a bi-product of his awkwardly botched upbringing -- Brady and his self-serving perversions are not above getting muffled by justice. Especially with a smile so skeevy.

Mr. Mercedes is the first novel in Stephen King's relatively recent crime trilogy centered around Bill Hodges, and David E. Kelley has done a fantastic job of bringing this dour -- but still often devilishly fun -- story into three dimensions, even if the TV show seems to be embracing the hard-boiled tropes that King turned on their heads. (At least early on, by way of Hodges' alcoholism outweighing his daytime TV obsessions.) If there's one major dispute to be had here, it's that the novel's true standout character Holly Gibney (played by Justine Lupe), didn't show up in those early episodes. Not that it's a real dispute, since she doesn't show up until the middle of the novel anyway, but it does feel weird to judge any form of Mr. Mercedes where she isn't present.

But judge it, I will, and I won't hesitate at all to judge it in high regards. As he did with HBO's Big Little Lies, David E. Kelley brought Mr. Mercedes to life in an engrossing way that burrows under your skin, and all while telling a fairly straightforward story whose biggest narrative trick is flashbacks. And through all the visceral and emotional turmoil, there are still many reasons to grin and cheer, even if it's just about watching a douchebag get just desserts. Why aren't more networks making TV like this? Certainly a vile soul like Brady is capable of collapsing the show's airbag of quality in the second half of the season, but from where I'm sitting, Mr. Mercedes looks to be the best TV adaptation of a Stephen King novel yet. Pretend the rating below is being presented as smiley face stickers on steering wheels.

Barnes & Noble’s fate rests in the hands of a British indie bookstore owner

By Sarah Todd
https://qz.com/1651414/barnes-nobles-new-ceo-wants-the-chain-to-be-more-like-an-indie/
July 21, 2019



James Daunt

In 2018, it seemed like the days of the United States’ last major bookstore chain were numbered. A decade of falling sales, brutal layoffs, 150 store closures, six chief executives, and a $1 billion loss on its Nook e-reader had left Barnes & Noble in the throes of anidentity crisis. So acute was its struggle that one New York Times critic imagined a sequel to the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail in which Tom Hanks—the big-box bookstore owner who crushes Meg Ryan’s independent book shop—is now the David to Amazon’s Goliath.

But here’s a better plot twist: What if Meg Ryan got tapped to save the big chain, and teach Hanks what people really want from their bookstore?

That’s the mission that Elliot Advisors, the hedge fund thatpurchased B&N for $638 million in June, has handed to freshly appointed CEO James Daunt. A 55-year-old Englishman, Daunt has spent nearly three decades in the bookselling business. For most of that time, he was exclusively Team Indie, overseeing an idyllic, boutique book-buying experience as the founder of Daunt Books, which has six locations in well-heeled neighborhoods in London.

Despite his small-business bona fides, Daunt has in the past decade emerged as an unlikely savior for big-box bookstores, first overseeing the revival of Waterstones, a UK chain with close to 300 branches, and now at Barnes & Noble. His turnaround strategy is centered on a simple premise: In a world where Amazon offers unbeatable convenience and prices, big book chains will only survive if they act more like independents.

Humanizing the big-box bookshop

“A good independent bookshop is something pretty special,” Daunt tells me. “It has personality and character, and that’s primarily driven by the people working in it, the booksellers. Also the manner in which they display their books, the amusement and serendipity of how they curate their shops.”

Daunt’s London bookstores guide readers toward such serendipitous discoveries. Some have books arranged by country rather than genre, a setup that encourages browsing: You might visit the Japan section looking for Haruki Murakami novels only to find yourself paging through a history of ramen or a book of haikus about cats. All Daunt stores eschew detailed signage for genres like “self-help” and “history” in favor of closely themed tables of books. In a recent podcast interview, Daunt said this is “so you can find your way around a shop subliminally.”

Daunt Books locations are also beautiful spaces, filled with dark wood shelves, green lamps, and gold light. The original location in Marylebone, which opened in 1990 on the site of an Edwardian-era bookseller, is long and narrow, with tall galleries of books offering a reassuring vision of orderly abundance. When authors do readings in Marylebone, their backs to an arched stained-glass window that serves as the room’s centerpiece, the scene resembles nothing so much as a church service.

That’s in keeping with Daunt’s attitude toward reading as a sacred act, and bookstores as gathering spaces for the devout. “Books, if you’re lucky enough to read and to be educated and opened up to reading, it’s hugely affirming,” he says. “It’s something that humanizes at all ages.”

Daunt’s personal affinity for books was what inspired him to open a bookstore at age 26, having worked for four years as an investment banker at JPMorgan—well, that and the urging of his then-girlfriend (now wife), who wanted Daunt out of finance. “I thought if I’m not going to do that office job, which was about as good as an office job as I could imagine, then I had to do something else,” he told the Financial Times in 2011. “And I like traveling and I like reading and it really wasn’t more sophisticated than that.”

The core of Daunt’s bookselling strategy relied upon investing in, and trusting, his staff. “The key to good staff is to keep them long-term; to build their careers; to teach them the trade,” Daunt told Jen Campbell for her 2014 book The Bookshop Book. “I think that the intelligent, proactive people who make good booksellers also make good bookshops.”

Daunt Books employees know how to make customers feel that they’re part of a community of readers. They abide by certain principles: Never recommend more than three books at a time, lest you overwhelm the customer. When someone asks for a recommendation, don’t just dish out your personal favorites. Instead, start by asking them, “What was the last good book you read?” Someone who loves Tana French mystery novels is more likely to appreciate Ruth Rendell than the newest Thomas Pynchon.

Over the years, Daunt Books developed a devoted fan base, securing a spot on pretty much every list of the best bookshops in London. In 2010, it even launched a publishing imprint, featuring both original works and reissued classics by authors like MFK Fischer and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Then, in 2011, Daunt’s career took an unexpected turn. Waterstones was sold to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, who tapped Daunt to be its managing director. His task was to turn around the struggling chain, which by that point was both unprofitable and widely perceived as money-grubbing and tacky. “They decided to take on the supermarkets and Smith’s by discounting prices and celebrity biographies,” former Waterstones managing director Tim Coates told The Guardian in 2009. “It was a strategic error. What they should have done was take on Amazon by offering something Amazon can’t—the lovely, serendipitous experience of being in a really good, big bookshop.”

The power of autonomy

Daunt describes the beginning of his Waterstones reign as “horrendous“—he cut costs by closing stores and laying off 200 employees. But then Daunt set about breathing life back into the company, in part by doing away with everything that made it cookie-cutter. He gave booksellers at each of the remaining stores autonomy over their inventory and promotions, so that each location’s offerings could be tailored to the communities it served. “What we did was give freedom over what they chose to display, in what quantity, and how,” Daunt says. Booksellers at individual stores could even set their own prices.

He also passed on some tricks of the trade. Daunt told booksellers to check the visual appeal of their displays by borrowing someone else’s glasses: With the titles fuzzed out, they might see how the colors juxtaposed. He did away with staff uniforms and three-for-two discount deals, and worked to make the shabby branches look polished and welcoming again. “A lot of what I did at Waterstones was spend money to make the places look nicer,” Daunt says.

He also had Waterstones stop peddling so many non-book products. Stationary, greeting cards, and other paper-based items were similar enough to books to be sensible. Educational toys and games were logical, too. Galoshes, on the other hand, were not. Says Daunt, “You’ve got to be able to work out why you’ve put the thing that isn’t a book in a bookshop.”

The retail rules do not apply

Daunt’s changes eventually paid off. In 2016, Waterstones turned a profit for the first time in eight years. In 2017, annual profits rose 80% over the year before, and in 2018 it was sold to Elliot Advisors. The turnaround was all the more remarkable because Daunt essentially convinced Waterstones to think locally—a reversal of the usual formula for success in big retail stores.

Starbucks, for example, trains baristas to make mocha lattes taste the same way at every location. Branches of Gap and Dick’s Sporting Goods don’t try to differentiate themselves with specialized stock; customers are supposed to have confidence in the brand’s consistency and know that they can walk into any store and pick up the same fishing pole or pair of skinny jeans.

But Daunt thinks books are a fundamentally different kind of product. “When you apply retailing principles to books, the wheels come off,”  he says. “If you’re selling vitamins, there’s just so many vitamin D’s and vitamin whatevers to make your hair luscious—there’s a limit. Booksellers have got millions and millions of product lines available to them, and the way you make a bookshop interesting is by mixing them up … So if you apply normal retailing discipline to bookstores, you wind up with something huge and full of books, but they don’t have soul.”

Not all of Daunt’s changes have come without controversy. Waterstones faced criticism for opening some unbranded stores that could easily be mistaken for indie shop. Daunt says the stores are categorically different from typical Waterstones outposts. “We decided that as they were very small bookshops in very small towns, it was barmy to call them Waterstones,” he told The Guardian.

Critics have also come after Waterstones for failing to mimic Daunt Books in one important respect: pay. While the workers at Daunt’s independent shops are salaried, Waterstones employees and their supporters recently petitioned for the chain to instate a minimum wage of £9 per hour and £10.55 per hour in London, in keeping with the recommendations of the UK’s Living Wage Foundation.

Daunt told The Bookseller that he agrees the wage for entry-level employees is inadequate, and said he’s “very sympathetic to the notion that booksellers should be paid better.” But, he said, “there is an equation to be had to what is a sustainable level of profit for the business and whether it’s wise to inflate the cost at the base rate at the moment.”

Why we still need Barnes & Noble

The UK consensus is that Daunt brought Waterstones back from the brink. Now Elliot Advisers is hoping he can do the same for Barnes & Noble. B&N operates at a much larger scale than Waterstones, with 627 locations, and its stores take up more square footage. Nonetheless, Daunt sees clear parallels between the two chains. As with Waterstones, he thinks this turnaround should start with giving booksellers autonomy over what they sell and display.

“That strategy has worked well for Waterstones, and it could work for B&N, which in its heyday gave some autonomy to regional and store managers and had regional buyers,” says John Mutter, editor in chief of Shelf Awareness. “Unfortunately in cost-cutting moves, buying has been centralized and made less personal, and most display ‘ideas’ come from headquarters. It’s one of many reasons that the company has had problems."

Daunt also expects to give B&N locations some of the aesthetic TLC that has been put off in an effort to hold down costs. With the company going private under Elliot’s ownership, Daunt expects Barnes & Noble will be somewhat liberated from short-term financial pressures.

As for how Barnes & Noble fits into a bookselling landscape where Amazon offers unbeatable convenience and indie shops hold the key to bibliophiles’ hearts, Daunt has faith that the big-box store remains valuable. Chains “have considerable resources in terms of availability, scale, and locations people want to be in,” he says. Moreover, they’re no longer the nemeses of independent sellers. As chains have faltered, indie bookshops are experiencing a resurgence in the US, increasing their numbers by 53% to more than 2,500 stores between 2009 and 2019, according the the American Booksellers Association.

“Only two decades ago, [Barnes & Noble] and Borders were considered the major rivals of indies,” Mutter says. “Now for most indies, B&N is more of a grumpy uncle who you hope does well.”

Independents want Barnes & Noble to succeed for two major reasons, according to Donna Paz Kaufman, who consults with independent-bookstore owners and runs her own store, Story & Song Bookstore Bistro in Fernandina Beach, Florida. They’re rooting for the chain both as a hedge against Amazon—a monopolistic force in bookselling if ever there was one—and because when Borders closed in 2011, along with its 399 remaining stores, many communities were left without access to any bookstores at all.

“Chains are fine and they’ll bring bookstores to places that maybe would otherwise not have bookstores,” Kaufman says, noting that many independent booksellers can’t afford the large retail spaces that permeate the suburbs. “We really feel like brick-and-mortar stores are important to the culture and US society at large.”

“Support your local corporate behemoth bookstore” may sound like an odd rallying cry. But Mutter notes that the fate of the entire book industry is intertwined with that of Barnes & Noble. “If B&N disappeared, publishers and wholesalers would have so many fewer brick-and-mortar stores to sell to, which would mean all kinds of cutbacks in sales, marketing, distribution, warehouses, etc., that service indies and B&N,” he says. In other words: Everyone who wants the US to have a thriving book trade should be rooting for Barnes & Noble to stick around.

A Barnes & Noble revival could also benefit the stores’ surrounding communities. Lively public spaces with the capacity to host readings, book clubs, children’s story hours, and larger events are a boon to both suburbia and cities. At Waterstones’ Picadilly location, the chain’s largest, a Friday evening might see four or five events going on on different floors. “Frankly, if you’re looking to meet someone in a nice environment and have an intelligent conversation, go there,” Daunt says. “It’s absolutely stuffed full of young people meeting each other and having fun. It’s a dramatically nicer place to do it than a pub or bar.”

Of course, this approach requires a staff to support it, and breathing room to build connections with local schools, clubs, and businesses. As of April 2018, Barnes & Noble had 23,000 employees, half of what it had in 2003, and Mutter notes that the company has a history of undervaluing its rank-and-file workers. “Only last year, there were company-wide layoffs that focused on the most experienced booksellers,” he says. “It made sense to the numbers guy in headquarters, but was a terrible move.”

The guys in Seattle

And what of Amazon—or, as Daunt sometimes refers to it, “the guys in Seattle.” In 2011, shortly after taking control at Waterstones, Daunt referred to Amazon as “a ruthless, money-making devil” and said it devalued booksellers by outsourcing their work to an algorithm. “All that ‘If you read this, you’ll like that’—it’s a dismal way to recommend books,” Daunt told The Independent. “A physical bookshop in which you browse, see, hold, touch and feel books is the environment you want.” 

A year later, Daunt had changed his tune; he announced that Waterstones would selling Kindles in its stores. But by 2015, Waterstones had started pulling the e-readers due to “pitiful” demand.

These days, Daunt is philosophical on the subject of Amazon. In his view, the company’s unmatchable scale is liberating for booksellers; it means stores can focus on curating books that communicate a particular aesthetic, rather than stocking up on things people need but don’t get excited about. “They’re allowing us not to have the boring books in our shops and just be places where you discover books and talk about books,” he says. “We don’t have to clog up [stores] with medical textbooks.”

He is similarly even-keeled about e-readers, one version of which he’s inheriting in Barnes & Noble’s Nook. While many industry experts have given up on the device—Mutter says it “failed irretrievably,” and Nook sales fell 17% during the fiscal year ended in April 2019—Daunt has not yet expressed plans to kill it, especially since B&N already dealt with the losses involved in its development. “It cheers me up greatly, now we’re in the position of being able to reap the benefits,” Daunt says. “As long as your reader is as good as a Kindle, which the new versions, and I’ve got one, seem, you’re letting customers choose to interact with you.”

The purpose of bookstores

The central conflict inYou’ve Got Mail revolves around the question of what bookstores are for. According to big-box CEO Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), selling books is the same as selling hardware or mattresses: They’re commodities, and Fox Books exists to help consumers buy the goods they want, cheaply and efficiently.

Meg Ryan—whose store is called The Shop Around the Corner—has a more idealistic view. Bookstores are communal and spiritual spaces. “She wasn’t just selling books,” Ryan’s character says of her late mother, who ran the shop before her. “She was helping people become what they were going to be.”

The past decade seems to have proven Ryan right. When community redevelopment projects poll residents about which businesses they’d like to see open in their area, Kaufman says the top answer is a bakery; the second is a bookshop. “A bookstore in a community is an anchor and a symbol of ideas and solutions and dreams and stories,” she says. “It’s really a lovely symbol and place for people to be, and to remember that all of those things are important in our lives.”

The success of chains rests on their ability to credibly convey this kind of symbolism. By contrast, Barnes & Noble for a long time seemed to be a bookstore that didn’t much care about reading. “Sadly, like Borders, B&N as a publicly held company had to please institutional investors, which meant, among other things, that it hired many executives from outside the book industry,” says Mutter. “Sometimes it’s been helpful to have a non-industry perspective, but the flood of non-book people helped sink Borders and has had, in the end, a bad effect on B&N.”

It’s safe to say that Daunt is, at the very least, a book person. He adores the work of Irish novelists Edna O’Brien and Sally Rooney, and reminisces about the joyful costume parties that took over Barnes & Noble locations during every Harry Potter release. Already, he’s planning (and “seriously overexcited about”) the rollouts for The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s forthcoming novel, and The Mirror and the Light, the final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy on Thomas Cromwell.

“We as booksellers, for those who are lucky enough to be able to buy books, are the way in which you can create an environment that communicates fun and humor and good nature,” Daunt says. “It’s important that they continue to exist.”

It’s masculinity to the rescue

By Miranda Devine
https://nypost.com/2019/08/14/its-masculinity-to-the-rescue/
August 14, 2019


Mert Ney is held down by passersby after his stabbing spree in Sydney, Australia

When a knife-wielding killer went on a bloody rampage through the streets of Sydney, Australia,this week, he was stopped in his tracks by a group of courageous men using just a milk crate and a chair.

Brandishing a butcher’s knife and yelling “Allahu Akbar,” 21-year-old Mert Ney already had allegedly murdered one woman and stabbed another in the back when six men armed themselves with weapons, ranging from a café chair to a firefighter’s ax, and chased him down.

With the killer pinned to the ground, one of the men yelled at him in outrage over his violence against women: “You’re a piece of . . . You stabbed a chick, mate.”

In every story of bloodshed and mayhem, it’s the same. Tales of selfless male heroism and chivalry emerge in the face of mortal danger.

These are men who rush toward danger, risking their lives and even dying in the noble cause of protecting women and children.

We saw it in the El Paso and Dayton massacres. There was David Johnson, 63, who pushed his wife and 9-year-old granddaughter to safety under a counter at the El Paso Walmart before he was fatally shot.

There was bar bouncer Jeremy Ganger, who stood his ground at the front door of the Dayton bar Ned Peppers, reportedly pulling people inside as they fled from the shooter who was firing an AR-15 and wearing body armor. Ganger suffered a shrapnel leg wound.

And, of course, there was the extraordinary bravery and competence of the Dayton cops. We saw them in footage released this week, running toward the shooter when the logical response was to race in the opposite direction. Guns drawn, they shot the killer dead in all of 32 seconds.

Or take 21-year-old Riley Howell, who charged at a gunman shooting up his classroom at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, in April and managed to knock him to the ground. Howell was killed but his heroic act saved the lives of up to 30 classmates.

We always are quick to point to the dark side of masculinity when violence is committed, but too often we overlook the feats of bravery by men who combat it.

Call it the chivalry instinct, it is what inspires men to run toward danger to protect the weak.

This is the noble side of masculinity that we once would perpetuate in folklore and stories passed down from father to son about what it means to be a real man.

But in the new era of “toxic masculinity,” young men are taught to ignore their heroic instincts and learn to be weak. They are instructed always to be on guard against the monster within.

Shaving-products company Gillette’s “toxic masculinity” campaign is a case in point. Whereas the razor maker used to celebrate the bond between fathers and sons, its new woke advertising is all about showcasing bad male behavior — such travesties as men standing behind BBQs or little boys roughhousing.

This demonization of intrinsic maleness is part of a feminist movement to rewrite human history as the tale of tyrannical patriarchy. It quickly mutated out of the #MeToo campaign, which began as a reasonable get-square with powerful men who preyed on women but since has taken on a frighteningly punitive air.

Now masculinity itself is the enemy and must be crushed from its earliest manifestations.

Boys and young men are bombarded with messages pathologizing their DNA. If they look at a woman, they’re accused of leering. If they open a door for a woman, they’re sexist. Even the way they sit on the subway has been criminalized as “manspreading.”

The American Psychological Association formalized the new pathology earlier this year by declaring “traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful.”

The male attributes it fingered as most worrisome were: stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, aggression, anti-femininity, achievement, “eschewal of the appearance of weakness,” adventure, risk and violence.

Gimme a break! Without any of that, all you’re left with is a soy boy with whom no self-respecting woman would want to mate.

This is the paradox of human attraction. Evolutionary psychologists have found that women instinctively desire a mate who can protect her and their offspring. “Modern women” look for “ancestral cues of a man’s fighting ability,” in the words of a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

This is the very masculinity that is being damned as the toxic seed of the patriarchy. Courage and derring-do is the essence of maleness and is what has allowed western civilization to prosper.