The Nix

by Nathan Hill

“Books. Sure. But mostly I build interest. Attention. Allure. A book is just packaging, just a container. This is what I’ve realized. The mistake people in the book business make is they think their job is to build good containers. Saying you’re in the book business is like a winemaker saying he’s in the bottle business. What we’re actually building is interest. A book is simply one shape that interest can take when we scale and leverage it.”

Discuss!!

The cigarettes give you something to do when you are out in public and feel like you’re being examined and appraised and judged. They serve the same function the smartphone will in about fifteen years: a kind of social shield, something to pull out of your pocket and fiddle with when you feel awkward about yourself.

She learned to speak the language of the midlevel executive, which mostly involved turning silly nouns into silly verbs: incentivize, maximize, dialogue, leverage.