Being the Decider for a Best American anthology is part honor
and part service, with ‘service’ here not as in ‘public service’ but rather as in ‘service industry.’ That is, in return for some pay and intangible assets, I am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about this kind of Decidering is interesting in all kinds of different ways; but the general point is that professional filtering/winnowing is a type of service that we citizens and consumers now depend on more and more, and in ever-increasing ways, as the quantity of available information and products and art and opinions and choices and all the complications and ramifications thereof
expands at roughly the rate of Moore’s Law.
David Forster Wallace im Vorwort zu The Best American Essays 2007 über seine Rolle als Herausgeber (via kottke.org)
Dazu eine richtig gute Idee: Brijit liest alle wichtigen Magazine und fasst die relevanten Texte, die dort erscheinen für seine Leser zusammen. Die Idee stammt von Jeremy Brosowsky, der der Washington Post sagt: „I wished there was someone who would tell me the five stories in that pile I have to read.“ Diesen Wunsch hat er jetzt mit drei festangestellen Redakteuren erfüllt.
