Your Daily Awesome

…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.
The immediate point, on the other hand, is obvious. Unless you
are both a shut-in and independently wealthy, there is no way you can sit
there and read all the contents of all the 2006 issues of all the hundreds of
U.S. periodicals that publish literary nonfiction. So you subcontract this job —
not to me directly, but to a publishing company whom you trust (for whatever
reasons) to then subsubcontract the job to someone whom they trust (or
more like believe you’ll trust [for whatever reasons]) not to be insane or
capricious or overtly ‘biased’ in his Decidering.
‘Biased’ is, of course, the really front-loaded term here, the one
that I expect Houghton Mifflin winces at and would prefer not to see uttered in
the editor’s intro even in the most reassuring context, since the rhetoric of
such reassurances can be self-nullifying (as in, say, running a classified
ad for oneself as a babysitter and putting ‘don’t worry — not a pedophile!’ at
the bottom of the ad)…

Read the full essay here
via Crazymonk