> Rick Gekoski, a book dealer who did business with Mr. Horowitz, described him in 2007 as “a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter.”
a1o 8 hours ago [-]
This magazine shows a pop that makes Safari ignore the gesture to go back, can't scroll up to go back to the address bar. For people using Safari on iPhone, is there any secret gesture to kill a tab like this?
Karellen 38 minutes ago [-]
Rotate the phone to landscape mode, and then into portrait. The address and tab bars should be displayed on the change to portrait.
ycombinete 8 hours ago [-]
Put it into reader mode as soon as the page loads, before the pop-up spawns.
Pikamander2 2 hours ago [-]
It also crashes my Chrome tab on Android.
lynx23 4 hours ago [-]
Switch to the "Tabs" tab and kill it?
blantonl 2 hours ago [-]
Just enough admiration by the author to make someone think they should be like this guy, and approaching life like him is appropriate.
Walking away after reading that article, I don't know whether or not to be appalled, or intrigued by the intricacies of the book collecting world and this dude.
One thing is for certain, if someone owed me six figures and they just hand waved it away with a slight of hand, I'd start throwing some chairs.
hristov 21 minutes ago [-]
What a scumbag. Make sure to read to the end of the article to read about things that he undoubtedly stole. Good job by the New Yorker journalist getting to the bottom of things and not being charmed by this psychopath. Very good article overall.
It is very depressing to see large public and non profit institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much less.
But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch “you will be so respected if you become an antique books and manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They will forget about your business dealings.”
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
"Keenly attuned to his guests’ networks and net worths" is a cute turn of phrase.
Watch out for this story, it'll suck you in.
ajdlinux 11 hours ago [-]
I have just lost an hour of my workday. A good longform profile of a single controversial character will do that to me.
ballooney 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly the sort of darling that that my college tutor would have said needed to be killed. “Yes, I know you’re very proud of it…”
vundercind 3 hours ago [-]
A couple well-placed em-dashes and at least it doesn’t read like the author is trying to rap.
5 hours ago [-]
stavros 7 hours ago [-]
Why would they say that it needs to be killed? To what end?
pjc50 7 hours ago [-]
The phrase "kill your darlings" circulates in fiction writing schools. The reasoning is that a "darling" turn of phrase which the author really likes is likely something that they are irrationally obsessed over and that distorts the editing process around itself, to the detriment of overall quality.
Like a lot of writing advice this is really subjective.
durumu 5 hours ago [-]
I feel like this comes up with me in programming too! Like if I write some really beautiful function as part of solving a problem, I will be a lot sadder if it doesn't make it in, sometimes to my detriment. Similar energy to "cattle not pets".
lynx23 4 hours ago [-]
Probably the most important lesson my C mentor ever told me: "Never be afraid to delete code, no matter how nice you think it is." It still hasn't fully landed with me, and I can relate to what you wrote. But I am trying to.
CamperBob2 46 minutes ago [-]
As well as "Build one to throw away. You will anyway."
toyg 5 hours ago [-]
I think it boils down to "nobody likes a showoff", really.
pjc50 2 hours ago [-]
Again, subjective. Some people like it and it can be a valid literary art form in itself. It's only in purely utilitarian text like technical writing where it doesn't belong.
dxdm 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not who you're replying to, but I agree with them. For my taste, it's a little too clever. It distracts from the subject of the text and instead draws attention to the form of the text itself and its author.
Worse than that, it's clunky-sounding and trips me up verbally.
That's subjective, of course, but I would have preferred if the author had left out this turn of phrase.
CamperBob2 38 minutes ago [-]
Eh, how often do you get to drop a new zeugma? I'll allow it.
A well written article, but it could probably have been like 10% of the length.
williamdclt 52 minutes ago [-]
I wonder how much shorter Crime and Punishment could have been made!
CamperBob2 16 minutes ago [-]
You can always run it through an LLM to create a summary of any desired length. Never know what you'll be missing, though. You might actually enjoy the experience of reading the original article yourself. Try it, see how it goes?
Rendered at 16:43:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/nyregion/don-henley-eagle...
> Rick Gekoski, a book dealer who did business with Mr. Horowitz, described him in 2007 as “a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter.”
Walking away after reading that article, I don't know whether or not to be appalled, or intrigued by the intricacies of the book collecting world and this dude.
One thing is for certain, if someone owed me six figures and they just hand waved it away with a slight of hand, I'd start throwing some chairs.
It is very depressing to see large public and non profit institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much less.
But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch “you will be so respected if you become an antique books and manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They will forget about your business dealings.”
Watch out for this story, it'll suck you in.
Like a lot of writing advice this is really subjective.
Worse than that, it's clunky-sounding and trips me up verbally.
That's subjective, of course, but I would have preferred if the author had left out this turn of phrase.